It goes without saying I do a prodigious amount of reading, and sometimes that takes me into the murky realm of fringe writers. And in my interactions with visitors at the museum, I occasionally come across folks who have some very strange ideas about ancient Egypt. Sometimes what they say makes me smile, and sometimes I want to rip out what’s left of my hair. That wouldn’t take long, really.

I also help moderate a very popular internet message board called Unexplained-Mysteries. The forum where I spend most of my time on UM is Ancient Mysteries & Alternative History, which is where I encounter the largest number of wacky fringe ideas. There is almost always a thread or three about ancient Egypt, and of these, one is almost always guaranteed to be about the Great Pyramid.

That’s not altogether surprising. Most fringe writers and readers really don’t have a working understanding of pharaonic Egypt, and to the average person the Great Pyramid is one of the singular icons of that great civilization. You think of Egypt, you think of that pyramid.

Few ancient monuments are as recognizable as the Great Pyramid, and arguably no ancient monument has been as misrepresented and abused as the Great Pyramid. No blog (or, indeed, book) could adequately cover all of the fringe themes about the Great Pyramid. I stress “theme” because none of these are theories in the proper historical sense of the word. A working theory requires evidence that can be substantiated. The fringe doesn’t do theories, so “theme” is an appropriate word.

Although this pyramid often appears in my blog, and is the main subject of more than one article, it isn’t actually of key interest to me. There is so much more to pharaonic times, and that’s part of the problem. Fringe fans do not seem to be aware of that. We’ll return to this sentiment in a bit. But suffice it to say, I often do write a lot about the Great Pyramid simply because there is so much public attention poured on it. I want to present the facts and erase misunderstandings.

Let’s take a brief look at just some of the oddball themes..

ALIENS

One of the most common is aliens, and there is a wide variety of alien themes attached to the Great Pyramid. It’s a landing pad for alien spacecraft. Together with the other pyramids at Giza it’s a land marker for alien spacecraft. The precision with which it was built “proves” only aliens could’ve erected the monument. I could fill quite a few articles describing just the alien themes, but then again I might take to ripping out my hair. I need what’s left of it.

In other versions of alien themes, benevolent aliens came to earth and taught primitive humans how to work stone. That’s probably a bit more palatable, but it still requires that aliens had to teach us stupid humans how to build stuff. And why would a super-advanced race of aliens traverse the endless cosmos just to come here to earth to teach ancient man how to build in…stone? They couldn’t manage better building technologies?

LOST CIVILIZATIONS

Related is the precision angle. Looking at the skill that went into the pyramid, not all fringe proponents think aliens did it but perhaps some lost civilization that was highly advanced and possessed super-technologies. Sometimes this is attributed to the survivors of the destruction of Atlantis, who resettled many thousands of years go in the land of Egypt. Never mind that Plato wrote the story of Atlantis as an allegorical tale, Atlantis feeds the fringe almost as much as the Great Pyramid does.

This goes back to a lack of knowledge about ancient Egypt and the tremendous amount of research that has gone into historical studies over the past 200-plus years. We know there was no great civilization in northeast Africa prior to pharaonic Egypt. No evidence exists for such a thing, and there would be surviving evidence for such a thing.

ADVANCED TECHNOLOGIES

Well, it’s true the skill level to build the pyramid was impressive, even if not quite as “perfect” as the fringe tends to think. But the fringe seems incapable of understanding how an Early Bronze Age civilization could manage such a feat. That deficit in comprehension is not the fault of Early Bronze Age engineers.

There are several fringe authors who advocate for advanced, lost technologies. They refuse to believe that the tools known to have existed in ancient times were fit for the job, so they force in arguments that there were power tools of the sort we use today—or tools even more advanced than ours. Their main argument if the tool marks left behind on stone masonry, which they refuse to believe ancient tools could’ve made, even though experiential archaeology has proved time and again that known ancient tools were perfectly suited to the work.

And the amount of perfection is indeed exaggerated. The Great Pyramid and many other pharaonic monuments are indeed very accurately oriented toward certain cardinal directions, but that is a direct reflection of religious and ritual requirements. And it hardly requires advanced astronomical tools to find true north. I was trained to do that as a kid in the boy scouts. The fact is, it’s the casing stones that are extremely well fitted (where they survive), but not so with the rest of the pyramid. The farther into the pyramid you go, the more rubble and mortar you encounter. The blocks are in a variety of sizez and shapes. This is not perfection.

There is the fellow who for a while was passionately advocating that the blocks of the pyramid were actually poured like concrete. Never mind that there is no evidence the Egyptians ever had the infrastructure for such an industry. That old theme has died away, along with so many others.

I even know one fellow who for years has tried to convince people on forums like the one I moderate, that there was a lost geyser technology that enabled the Egyptians to lift the stones so high. He tends to be chased out of forums because he simply cannot offer realistic evidence to support any aspect of his bizarre theme. It’s all in his head.

There is so much more, such as levitation employed through sound or mind power and other ideas divorced from reality. But you get the idea. People who don’t understand ancient engineering skills and potentials, and have no desire to acquire realistic learning, will attach all sorts of truly odd themes to the pyramid.

THE AGE OF THE PYRAMID

Before moving on I also need to touch on this. Very popular to this day are the themes that the pyramid is thousands of years older than conventionally thought. The conventional theory is that it was built around 2500 BCE. Two rounds of extensive carbon dating have shown that it might have been built around a century earlier than thought, which was a surprise to no one in Egyptology. But even now, fringe writers want their readers to believe the pyramid is more like 10,000 years old.

This goes back to an absence of education about pharaonic Egypt, and the known stages of development the people in the Nile Valley underwent leading up to state formation (c. 3100 BCE). We know these facts because of real-world archaeology and research, and of course modern science like carbon dating. But fringe writers constantly either try to ignore the science or pretend it’s just wrong, which might be convenient but ultimately just reveals fringe writers’ lack of knowledge about the applicable science.

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What this all boils down to, I stress again, is a very narrow and insufficient understanding of ancient Egypt, on multiple levels. The fringe is obsessed with the Great Pyramid, as though it is the only thing in the Nile Valley the Egyptians ever built. In point of fact, the Great Pyramid was of great importance only in Dynasty 4, when it was built as the eternal home, or tomb, for King Khufu. It was for his mortuary cult. The next king immediately started the building of his own tomb, at a site called Abu Rawash, and that monument then became the focus of the state.

Extant evidence shows us there were priests working in Khufu’s pyramid complex until the end of the Old Kingdom (c. 2195 BCE), so there was an active cult for Khufu during all of that time. That’s pretty good. But after that Egypt fell into chaos and civil war, during the troubled time we refer to as the First Intermediate Period. Giza was abandoned. It would never again hold the place of prominence it did in Dynasty 4, and the Great Pyramid arguably less so. That is historical fact. Khufu was of course remembered for generations after his death, but his pyramid was not any sort of focus to the Egyptians in later centuries.

Dynastic Egypt experienced numerous rises and falls, from the glories of empire during the New Kingdom to the repeated invasions of foreign kingdoms during the Late Period. In one brief time during the Late Period, Dynasty 26, Giza did experience a renaissance, but it really wasn’t the Great Pyramid that was the focus. The main monument at Giza that was of importance to later generations was the Great Sphinx.

The Great Sphinx of Giza

The monarchs of the Saite Period (Dynasty 26) revered the Sphinx and restored some of its former glories. The one pyramid at Giza which became of importance at that time was one of the little pyramids to the east of the Great Pyramid, whose small temple complex had been turned into a little temple to the goddess Isis. It had originally been erected for the burial of a queen or daughter of Khufu, but that was forgotten by Dynasty 26.

The logistics and manpower it took to build the Great Pyramid was truly impressive. It shows the skill and resources of Dynasty 4, not to mention the stature and power of Khufu. But in reality the Great Pyramid is just a massive pile of stones, even if it was the tallest building on earth until the Eiffel Tower.

But think of the later monuments the Egyptians built. The more time went on, the more advanced their building skills became. Arguably the single-most important building from pharaonic Egypt isn’t the Great Pyramid but the Karnak temple complex, known in ancient times as Ipet-Isut, “the most select of places.” This temple served a wide variety of purposes but was the principal cult center for Amun, the most important deity of the New Kingdom and for centuries thereafter. Generation after generation of pharaohs added to it.

The Karnak temple complex

Its massive pylons and soaring columns made Karnak one of the largest religious structures mankind ever built, and its architecture and masonry represent a level of engineering skill several orders of magnitude superior to that of the Great Pyramid.

One of the greatest pharaohs of the New Kingdom was Ramesses II, who reigned for 67 years. Ramesses was a prodigious builder, including at Karnak. And what he didn’t build he might claim for himself, by erasing a preceding king’s name and carving in his own. Archaeologists have nicknamed him “the Chiseler” for this practice.

But one monument that was all his doing was the great temple at Abu Simbel, just inside ancient Nubia to the south of Egypt. It served as a reminder to the Nubians that Ramesses was the big man on the block and it was best to mind him. It is still a popular tourist stop to this day.

Abu Simbel, the great monument of Ramesses II to the south of Egypt, Dynasty 19.

Each statue—all four of which depict Ramesses himself—stands about 60 feet tall, and a temple with columns was carved deep into the mountainside. This edifice dramatically reflects the far-reaching power and might of Ramesses II, and is unlike anything builders in the time of the Great Pyramid would’ve dared to attempt.

But we all have our favorite Egyptian monuments. I love all of them, some more than others. If I were to chose an overall favorite, it would have to be the great mortuary temple of Hatshepsut at the site Deir el Bahri.

Mortuary temple of Hatshepsut, Dynasty 18.

Hatshepsut is one of those kings who fell out of favor and was erased from history by later kings. This was mainly because Hatshepsut was a woman. Women were not supposed to be kings. So a lot of her monuments and inscriptions were destroyed after she died, but later kings kept her mortuary temple largely intact. It was used for centuries for the rituals and processions of later generations. They may have wanted to forget about Hatshepsut, but her temple was too beautiful to ignore.

All told, the Egyptians were indeed master stonemasons. They were the first in the world to build colossal monuments with stone, and no one could do it like they could. They didn’t need aliens or levitation or geysers or super-technologies. They needed only themselves and their own ingenuity.

A new year has dawned, placing pharaonic Egypt even farther back in time. But we continue to study them and celebrate them. We continue to understand what was important to them and why. We will never stop learning. I dare ask, when will the fringe start learning?

No bibliography for this article. I was just in the mood to write, and perhaps to vent a little. The above comes from memory.

Some time ago my friend Mary Jo was facilitating in our Egyptian exhibit with a young couple. The young man and woman wanted Mary Jo to tell them more about the Hebrews who were slaves in Egypt. Specifically, they wanted to learn more about how the ancient Jews built the pyramids. Mary Jo answered quite correctly that we have no evidence that the Hebrews were involved with pyramid building.

Now, as one might imagine, this is a topic that pops up frequently in our exhibit. Some docents are well versed in the subject, some don’t really care to discuss it in fear of offending visitors. It is never our intent to offend. Our intent is to inform and educate. So, as I stress to prospective docents whom I train, we must be honest. Diplomatic but honest. Mary Jo herself is particularly good at doing this. But she was a bit nonplussed when the couple with whom she was speaking seemed offended and argumentative. They didn’t want to believe her information. They had walked off before I could get the chance to take part (and side with Mary Jo—I love a spirited argument).

I enjoy talking about the Bible in our exhibit. For the most part I meet people who are very open minded and want to know the facts. I’m only too happy to share the facts. I’ve discussed these matters with everyone from Christians who have a layperson’s interest to Orthodox rabbis who’ve forgotten more about the Old Testament than I’ll ever learn.

So when I heard about Mary Jo’s encounter, I thought it might make for a useful article on my blog. I wanted to write it sooner, but as my previous article expressed, I’ve been dealing with some weighty health issues lately. This, the 4th of July, is a good opportunity to write the article at long last. It’s either that or do nothing but watch some reruns of NCIS.

That said, who really built the pyramids of Egypt? And what’s the origin of the myth that ancient Jews built them? The latter answer I’ve known for many years, and the former answer I’ve been researching for much longer. And along the way I’ve learned a great deal about all extremes of the myth.

When thinking of ancient Egypt most people picture the Great Pyramid of Giza, the biggest of them all. It was erected in Dynasty 4 for a powerful king named Khufu (c. 2540 BCE). Consequently many regular folks think this is the pyramid the Hebrews were forced to build.

The Great Pyramid of Khufu, third millennium BCE)

All of us docents hear this, practically every day we’re there. And it’s a worthy topic to discuss. It might be wrong, but at least it’s grounded in something plausible on the face of it. I’d much rather discuss that than aliens building the pyramid or that the pyramid was some sort of high-tech power plant, topics which are divorced from reality. We won’t waste time on them here—we’re sticking with the Hebrews (although there’s always material for future articles).

Well, then, where did the myth start? Why do so many people take it as fact that Hebrews built these incredible Egyptian monuments in the Early Bronze Age? It must be Hollywood, right? Well, Hollywood has done much to perpetuate the myth, but movies aren’t the origin.

In the first century CE, when Rome ruled the world, there was a prominent Jewish man from Galilee named Joseph ben Matityahu who became a general of Hebrew forces in the first Jewish uprising against Rome. He surrendered to Roman forces in 67 CE. In short order Matityahu was granted his freedom and took the name Titus Flavius Josephus—the “Flavius” portion being the family name of the Roman emperor Vespasian.

Matityahu, now Josephus, spent the rest of his life writing histories of the Hebrews for a largely Roman audience, to make his people and heritage better understood to Rome. Josephus was a prolific writer…and we can blame him for the origin of the pyramid myth. Yes, it really does go back that far in time. In Book II of his work Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus writes:

…they set them [Hebrews] also to build pyramids: and by all this wore them out, and forced them to learn all sorts of mechanical arts, and to accustom themselves to hard labour.

So that’s where it starts. Down through history, the error was compiled and compounded. Now, Josephus was a brilliant man and well educated, so much of his tracts on Jewish custom and law are arguably reliable. But as with other writers of late antiquity, the farther back in time an event was that he wrote about, the less accurate it tends to be. And the pyramids of Egypt do indeed date far back in time. They were already remarkably ancient by the time Josephus lived.

Some adherents to the Bible play more loosely with the facts, and they can be clever. Exodus 1:11 talks about how Hebrew slaves built the store houses of Pithom and Ramses, and in their labors they made mud brick. Well, quite a few of the smaller pyramids are in fact made largely of mud brick, with stone exteriors and chambers. Well, there you go! So some historians and enthusiast. especially from early times, have figured that these mud-brick pyramids were older and less refined than the bigger masonry pyramids like the Great Pyramid, so the Hebrews must’ve built those mud-brick pyramids. It has some internal logic, right? The Egyptians must’ve been learning along the way and got better at their engineering and architecture, so their monuments got only bigger.

But cold-hard fact shows us the opposite is true. Those smaller mud-brick pyramids were built later. In Dynasty 4 Khufu was a truly powerful king who could marshal limitless resources and had the full measure of the state behind him. But by Dynasty 5 fortunes had changed and the Egyptian kings had become weaker. They did not have the power and wealth to erect massive monuments. Mud brick was cheaper and easier. A good example is one of my own favorites of the later pyramids, that of King Unis from the end of Dynasty 5:

Mud-brick pyramid of Unis, dynasty 5, c. 2400 BCE

It looks like little more than a big anthill today and is not so impressive on the outside. What makes it stand out is the full range of Pyramid Texts inscribed onto the walls of its interior chambers. That was not yet a tradition in Khufu’s early time. Unis was the first king to have these texts (religious funerary spells).

The Egyptians continued to erect smaller pyramids until the end of Dynasty 6, when the Old Kingdom ended and the government and country collapsed. It descended into civil war. Pyramids were still sporadically made through this troubled time, although still of mud brick. Egypt rebounded wonderfully in the Middle Kingdom (c. 1990 BCE) and more pyramids were erected, but still only of mud brick. No pyramid ever again would reach the height and grandeur of the Great Pyramid, even though kings of the Middle and New Kingdoms were arguably a lot more powerful than Khufu. The religion was changing at all levels, as the underworld god Osiris was embraced by all classes. Pyramids were no longer the focus they used to be.

But that’s neither here nor there. What were the Hebrews up to during all of this long stretch of history, if they weren’t building the pyramids? The answer is simple. They didn’t yet exist. One still sees folks trying to force them into an Egyptian context in a way that doesn’t make a lot of sense. For instance, you’ll see an image such as the following (and similar) often identified as Hebrew slaves in Egypt:

Slaves at work in Egypt, New Kingdom

Such images on tomb and temple walls do in fact often depict slaves at work, but they’re not Hebrews. The inscriptions that often accompany them say they’re Syrians, Libyans, Nubians, and other such foreigners—but they’re not identified as Hebrews.

Almost every king of the New Kingdom in particular has been charged as the pharaoh of Exodus. The fact is, from the Egyptian perspective and outside the pages of the Old Testament, there is simply no evidence the Exodus even occurred. I don’t want to derail us with a long diatribe on the historicity of Exodus, mainly because I’ve already written an article on that (see “Exodus: Fact or Fiction?“).

Ramesses II: mummy (left) and typical statue, Dynasty 19

But suffice it to say, most historians who try to fit Exodus into an historical timeframe tend to favor Ramesses II as that pharaoh. This has much to do with Exodus 1:11’s mention of the Hebrews having built the store cities of Pithom and Rameses (mentioned earlier). And the first recorded mention of a people called “Israel” appears on a large victory stela commissioned by Ramesses’ son and successor, Merneptah, in 1208 BCE:

The Merneptah victory stela, Dynasty 19, c. 1208 BCE

This happens to meld nicely with archaeology of the Holy Land, which shows a people identifiable as “proto-Hebrew” starting to rise among Canaanite populations in the Levant at the tail-end of the Bronze Age.

So historically, temporally, and physically, the Hebrews could not have built the pyramids of Egypt. Well, then, who did? Was it aliens? Apologies, I’ve already promised we’re not going to go there.

That answer is also simple: the Egyptians built the pyramids. And they really weren’t slaves. Not technically. But they didn’t have much say in the matter. If a king needed soldiers for a military campaign or a lot of workers to build a big monument, he had all the manpower he needed. In an early period such as when Khufu reigned, men could be drafted into the military or into works projects; Egypt didn’t have a professional standing army until the New Kingdom. Word would go out from the court to the regional governors to raise manpower. In occasional Old Kingdom tombs, some autobiographies actually include the tomb owner’s pride in being able to raise all the men the king wanted from his region. This was a system called corvée labor, and it was common throughout the ancient Near East.

In many instances those subjected to corvée labor were not paid, but we know the Egyptian laborers were paid. This was generally in foodstuffs, beer, cloth, and the like. And the men assigned to work gangs were not forced to spend the rest of their lives in labor. They would spend a number of months at the work site, and were then sent back home to their fields and herds. Fresh manpower was raised as needed. This is not to say no slaves were present, because certainly some were. But slaves were more commonly sent under military guard to distant quarries to fetch more exotic stones, and other such tasks. Most workers on-site were paid laborers.

I’m not going to dumb things down by saying all of these paid laborers were thrilled and honored to be part of the king’s work project. I can’t begin to imagine how grueling and dangerous the work could be. And we’ll never know how many men were killed while building something like a pyramid. But they weren’t slaves—and they certainly weren’t Hebrews.

You can’t force an entire people into slavery if that people’s culture and society didn’t even exist yet. The fact is, we don’t have much evidence for Hebrews in Egypt in any numbers prior to the Late Period (starting c. 731 BCE). By that time they were largely merchants and mercenaries serving the king’s army and residing mostly in very southern Egypt, in their own communities around Elephantine. They would later cluster in very northern Egypt, in and around Alexandria. And of course by that time, when the Greeks had taken over Egypt, the pyramids were already very ancient. As we docents like to remind folks: the pyramids are older to Cleopatra than she is to us.

There is no mention of the pyramids in the Bible, in the Old Testament or otherwise. The Hebrews of old don’t mention them because they, the Hebrews, had nothing to do with the pyramids.

As always, I thank you for reading and welcome your comments.

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My bibliography is largely the same as that for other articles I’ve written, such as for Exodus; this new article approaches the information from a different angle.

Author’s note: I realize this article could be taken as controversial to some and off-putting to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is not my intent to offend Mormons, but as to the subject of this article, I do openly call into question the veracity of the work of Joseph Smith. All historians familiar with the source material herein discussed share the same overt skepticism. In this article I do not wish to delve into modern religion or faith but simply to provide my own brief critical analysis of the Joseph Smith Papyri and specifically that papyrus which Smith pronounced to be “The Book of Abraham.”

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In July 1835 one Michael Chandler arrived in Kirtland, Ohio with four Egyptian mummies and a collection of Egyptian papyri. At this point in time Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon church, was living in Kirtland. Around five years earlier Smith had completed his Book of Mormon for his nascent religion, and in constructing the Book of Mormon he is said to have interpreted golden plates containing an obscure language he referred to as “Reformed Egyptian.” It is not surprising, then, that Smith should take an immediate interest in Chandler’s small but valuable collection.

Within a month Smith and members of his church had rounded up the funds and purchased Chandler’s collection for the sum of $2400 (Ritner 2013: 1). Soon thereafter Smith recruited several church members as “scribes” and set about examining the papyri. Smith is said to have quickly recognized the biblical nature of some of the papyri, including one he regarded as “The Book of Abraham”. This papyrus (designated P. Joseph Smith 1) is the focus of my article.

For the record, however, the Joseph Smith Papyri included a Book of Breathing (also known as a Breathing Permit), several fragments from different Books of the Dead, and several more that were eventually lost after the collection was split up. It is not known for certain what became of the lost fragments of papyri but they are thought to have been destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire in 1871 (Marquardt 2013: 65-66). It’s a pity they were lost because one text was an interesting papyrus known in modern scholarship as a hypocephalus:

A hypocephalus similar to one originally in the Smith collection, but now lost.

This amuletic device, usually made of papyrus and plaster, originated in the Late Period (664-332 BCE) of ancient Egypt and contains Spell 162 from the Book of the Dead, a spell providing heat and light (thus, life) to the deceased (Taylor 2010: 61, 130). It was placed under the heads of mummies.

Joseph Smith’s “Translations”As mentioned, I’m going to narrow my focus to the text Smith named “The Book of Abraham.” For a more comprehensive treatment of the full set of papyri, there are numerous modern sources but I would recommend Robert Ritner’s The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri: A Complete Edition (Signature Books, 2013). Ritner, a prominent Egyptologist with the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, has exhaustively researched these papyri and their backstory.

Smith interpreted the papyri in a similar fashion to his Book of Mormon with its mysterious golden plates written in “Reformed Egyptian.” The main difference here is, while no evidence exists for the golden plates, most of the papyri in question are still extant and plenty of people, from professionals to laymen, have examined them. Smith had his scribes at the ready while he examined the papyri and “dictated” the contents of their ancient writing. The manuscripts which record his interpretations are still in the archives of the LDS, and the church men who acted as scribes are named in the manuscripts.

So at least we have a fairly detailed written account of how Smith approached the matter, from the hands of his own brethren. These records include an “Egyptian Alphabet” which Smith devised to show how he “translated” the papyri. That is to his credit, I suppose. Always show your work, after all.

But it should be pointed out that Egyptian hieroglyphs had been deciphered by the Frenchman Jean François Champollion in 1822, only thirteen years before Smith conducted his “translations.” As a matter of fact, news of Champollion’s achievement did not widely reach the United States until the early 1840s. By this time Smith was publishing his “translations” in Mormon literature.

In other words, there was no one yet in the Western Hemisphere who could realistically understand or decipher ancient Egyptian writing (which further includes the more cursive hieratic script seen throughout the Smith papyri). Presumably, as with the mysterious golden plates in 1830, Smith was receiving divine inspiration to be able to interpret the papyri.

His “Egyptian Alphabet” reveals that Smith believed each Egyptian character could bear numerous levels of meaning, which he called degrees. As an example, the character he took to have the sound “Tota toues-Zip Zi” could be interpreted in this way (Marquardt 2013: 34; spelling mistakes from manuscript preserved):

1st Degree: “The land of Egypt”

2nd Degree: “The land which was discovered under water by a woman”

3rd Degree: “The woman sought to settle her sons in that land. She being the daughter of Ham”

4th Degree: “The land of Egypt discovered by a woman who afterwards sett[l]ed her sons in it”

5th Degree: “The land of Egypt which was first discovered by a woman <whter [while?] under water>, and afterward settled by her sons she being a daughter of Ham”

Some of the papyri, including that called “The Book of Abraham,” contained vignettes (depictions or pictures) which Smith had produced as woodcuts for inclusion in his publication.

Smith “deduced” that the papyrus we designate as P. Joseph Smith 1 was “The Book of Abraham” and was written in the very hand by that biblical patriarch. Here is the actual papyrus:

The papyrus Smith called “The Book of Abraham.”

According to Smith’s “translations” this was a book in which Abraham related his story of escaping human sacrifice in Ur of the Chaldeans and ended up in Egypt, where he became the keeper of ancient archives stretching back to the dawn of time. Here is how Smith published the opening to “The Book of Abraham” (1:2; ibid):

…having been myself a follower of righteousness, desiring also to be one who possessed great knowledge, and to be a greater follower of righteousness, and to possess greater knowledge, and to be a father of many nations, a prince of peace, and desiring to receive instructions, and to keep the commandments of God, I [Abraham] became a rightful heir, a High Priest, holding the right belonging to the fathers.

This was published in 1842 in a Mormon newsletter called Times and Seasons. As mentioned, woodcuts were also published which were adapted from actual vignettes which appeared in the papyri. This is the illustration published with “The Book of Abraham:”

Woodcut accompanying “The Book of Abraham” as published in 1842.

This is the scene which is supposed to show the attempted human sacrifice of Abraham in Ur of the Chaldeans. Smith “translated” the vignette to mean that the Chaldean priests practiced Egyptian customs and worshiped Egyptian deities. Note the numbers within the illustration. Based on Smith’s “translations” the objects so numbered are thus identified (adapted from Times and Seasons, March 1842, Vol III, No. 9):

The Angel of the Lord

Abraham, fastened upon an Altar.

The Idolatrous Priest of Elkenah attempting to offer up Abraham as a sacrifice.

The Altar for sacrifice, by the Idolatrous Priests, standing before the Gods of Elkenah, Libnah, Mahmachrah, Korash, and Pharaoh.

The Idolatrous God of Ekenah.

The Idolatrous God of Libnah.

The Idolatrous God of Mahmachrah.

The Idolatrous God of Korash.

The Idolatrous God of Pharaoh.

Abraham in Egypt.

Designed to represent the pillars of Heaven, as understood by the Egyptians.

Raukeeyang, signifying expanse, or the firmament, over our heads, but in this case, in relation to this subject, the Egyptians meant it to signify Shamau, to be high, or the heavens: answering to the Hebrew word, Shaumahyeem.

Smith fancied himself a linguist and professed to be able to translate a number of ancient tongues, even though he had no formal education in them. “The Book of Abraham” is probably his most fanciful example of such work.

In October 1880 “The Book of Abraham,” along with other literature created by Joseph Smith, was canonized by LDS Church members as official scripture (ibid 61).

Academic AnalysesEventually there was sought academic opinion on Smith’s “translations,” beginning around 1859. Smith had been dead for fifteen years by then, and Champollion had translated hieroglyphs almost forty years earlier. So by this point in time, many scholars were starting to become adept at ancient Egyptian writing and could offer a reliable, academic assessment of the Joseph Smith Papyri.

In 1912 a collection of recognized scholars including A.H. Sayce, W.M.F. Petrie, J.H. Breasted, and A.C. Mace, reviewed the “translations” and uniformly dismissed their credibility (with some measure of derision). Understandably this didn’t sit well with a lot of Mormon members, who could not assault the academic merits of the Egyptologists’ assessments so decided instead to try to attack the character of the field of Egyptology (Ritner 2013: 4-5). This is a typical fringe ploy, or in this case the ploy of a church whose tenet is being questioned, and it never passes muster. If one’s counterargument cannot address and challenge the merits of an academic position, the counterargument has no legs to stand on in the first place.

Looking again at “The Book of Abraham,” a proper academic assessment reveals it to be an ancient Egyptian funerary text called the Book of Breathing (also called the Breathing Permit). The earliest appearance of this funerary text is the Ptolemaic Period (332-30 BCE), when the Macedonian successors of Alexander the Great ruled Egypt. Based on textual analysis and the tracing of the family line of this papyrus’s owner, the Book of Breathing which Smith called “The Book of Abraham” can be dated to the first half of the second century BCE (Coenen 2013: 77).

This is obviously a very long time after the patriarch Abraham is supposed to have lived (and is beside the fact that no extrabiblical evidence exists for the patriarch, but that’s another matter). This Book of Breathing actually belonged to a Theban priest named Hor (the Greek derivation would be Horus, so this priest was named after the great falcon deity, as many Egyptian men were down through time).

It is perhaps useful to explain that by the mid-Ptolemaic Period, the Book of Breathing was beginning to replace the Book of the Dead in many burials, although examples of the latter are still known down to the onset of the Roman period in Egypt. Books of Breathing absorbed some of the content and purposes of earlier funerary texts such as the Book of the Dead. Their main purpose was to preserve the importance of breathing to the deceased, to prolong the existence of the name, and to prevent the eternal “second death” that all ascended souls feared (Hornung 1999: 24).

Academic analyses of the Joseph Smith Papyri has gone on until the present, although understandably access to them is highly restricted. A lot of scholars who’ve attempted to analyze the papyri have had to make due with photographs and the analyses and translations of earlier scholars.

Along the way scholars have noticed that Smith and his scribes back in the 1830s affixed the fragile papyri to stiff sheets of paper to stabilize them, and in many cases small fragments were incorrectly fitted into lacunae (holes in the papyri). It’s been further noted that Smith seems to have invented some characters in the ancient texts and “filled in the blanks” according, evidently, to his imagination. For example, above I posted the image which supposedly shows Abraham tied to an altar while a Chaldean priest attempts to sacrifice him. Here is a close-up of the actual state and nature of that vignette in the Book of Breathing of the priest Hor:

The actual fragmented vignette in the Book of Breathing of Hor.

As is known from a plethora of other, similar funerary papyri, this is a depiction of the mummification of the underworld god Osiris (or the papyrus owner as Osiris). The figure on the bed is a deceased individual undergoing mummification. The damaged standing figure is not a priest performing human sacrifice but is the jackal-headed god Anubis; he does not clutch a knife. The bird-figure above the head of the deceased person is not the “Angel of the Lord” but is the deceased person’s ba, or soul, waiting to rejoin the body. And the four figures below the funerary couch are not deities called Libnah, Mahmachrah, Korash, and Pharao, but are the canopic jars into which the deceased’s mummified internal organs will be placed. This is all Egyptology 101. Compare the fragmented vignette above to the complete image below, from another funerary text:

Intact mummification scene from another funerary text.

This is the actual content and nature of “The Book of Abraham.” Not surprisingly it has nothing to do with biblical lore. It is strictly traditional ancient Egyptian funerary material.

Also, although Smith proclaimed that this text spoke of Chaldean priests of Ur performing Egyptian rituals, there is no evidence of Egyptian cults from the Mesopotamian city of Ur (Woods 2013: 89-91). This, too, was an invention on Smith’s part, but no doubt allowed him to explain why documents found in Egypt should “relate” such information.

The academic assessment takes into account the fact that no one in the United States in Smith’s time could read or understand hieroglyphs, and a careful academic analysis cannot accept “divine inspiration” as an explanation. While his own church members of the time fervently believed in his “translations,” Smith’s own “Egyptian Alphabet” shows he actually had no knowledge of the grammar or vocabulary of that ancient language. The words and interpretations (including the five-part degrees for vocabulary) do not correspond to any reality of the ancient Egyptian language.

The Papyri After SmithJoseph Smith died violently in June 1844 and the mummies and papyri passed to his mother, Lucy M. Smith. Lucy Smith died in May 1856, and within a couple of weeks this collection was sold to a man named Abel Combs (Marquardt 2013: 61). After that the collection was sold and resold again, and was eventually split up. In the 1940s some of the papyri ended up in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. As mentioned earlier, some of the other papyri. including the hypocephalus, is believed to have ended up in a small collection that was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire.

In the mid-1960s the Metropolitan Museum, as museums occasionally do, began to sell pieces of its collection to raise money. The surviving Joseph Smith Papyri actually made their way in November 1967 back to the possession of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

As all big religions do, the Mormons had their share of problems from within throughout the years, and a breakaway sect that eventually called itself the Community of Christ, in Missouri, subsequently repudiated Smith’s “translations” of the papyri and does not regard them as canonical. The LDS Church continues to regard them as canonical but since reacquisition in 1967 most LDS members appear no longer to recognize them as a literal translation of an ancient text (ibid 67). However, that Smith received “divine inspiration” to discern the overall meaning of the papyri seems still to be the case.

As an aside, while doing research for this article I was curious to see what modern Mormons might have to say about the papyri. Online I found a Mormon message board that had several discussions about the papyri, including “The Book of Abraham,” so on some level this material is still relevant to LDS members.

I am no atheist and was raised in a conservative Roman Catholic household. I am no stranger to the requirements devout people must have to believe or accept the tenets of their faith, and how strange some of the background to a faith may be. But that’s just it: it’s a matter of faith. Do I believe Smith’s translations or his interpretations of these ancient papyri? Of course not, but I recognize that faith is not science.

I welcome comments from believers and non-believers alike, definitely including Mormons. I’ve known very few Mormons in my life and have never talked to them about these papyri, so I’d be curious to hear what active LDS members have to say.

One of the most popular exhibits at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago is our ancient Egyptian exhibit, which goes by the name “Inside Ancient Egypt.” It’s a large exhibit and not surprisingly one of its biggest draws is the myriad of mummies on display. There are around twenty, originating mostly from the later periods of pharaonic history (which is, coincidentally, the source of most mummies you see in museums).

Of all of these mummies the favorite of museum goers and staff alike is usually Harwa. Displayed to the right of Harwa is his elaborate coffin. What makes Harwa particularly interesting is the fact that his head is unwrapped and you can see his face very clearly; there is also the fact that Harwa is unusually well preserved, a happy fate certainly not shared by all Egyptian mummies.

I thought it might be fun to do an article about Harwa. What can his mummy tell us about him? What can his coffin reveal to us? When did he live and what did he do in life? In point of fact it’s amazing what we can discern about an ancient person just from his mummy and coffin, so I’d like to share some facts about Harwa with you.

First, allow me to clear up a mistake I occasionally see associated with this mummy. This is not the mummified body of the more famous Great Steward and nobleman of the early seventh century BCE who erected a sprawling tomb (TT37) at el-Assif, Thebes. That was an earlier man by the same name. Although “Harwa” was not necessarily a common name in Egypt (and is not even Egyptian in origin, as we shall see), it is attested for numerous individuals in the later dynasties. Possibly the only commonalities between that Harwa and our museum’s Harwa is that both shared the same name, both lived in the Late Period, and both were buried in the vast Theban necropolis.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s see what we can learn about Harwa. We’ll start with his mummy.

The mummy of Harwa

The mummy is that of a Late Period man dating to the late seventh century BCE, specifically to around the early 600s BCE. I’ll explain later why I assign that date to him. While he is commonly referred to as coming from Dynasty 25, I might instead suggest very early in Dynasty 26 (Saite Period, so named because the Delta city of Sais was the administrative capital of Egypt at that time).

Harwa’s display in the exhibit

I should note before continuing that the placement of Dynasty 25 varies according to the preferred chronologies of certain Egyptologists: some place it at the end of the Third Intermediate Period and others at the start of the Late Period. The Field Museum favors the latter placement, as do I. This article is not for the purposes of a discourse on dynastic chronology but the Third Intermediate Period is that length of time during which Egypt was ruled primarily by Libyan-borne pharaohs. Therefore I personally find Dynasty 25 a nice fit for the start of the Late Period—it marks a time of profound transitions when Egypt was fast losing its autonomy, was ruled by foreign powers, and was beginning to approach its historic end. Dynasty 25, for instance, was when pharaohs of Kushitic (Nubian) heritage ruled Egypt.

The mummy of Harwa is displayed behind an anthropoid glass shield on which is mounted a rich array of funerary amulets. None of these belong to Harwa (and, indeed, they represent a quantity arguably considerably larger than most mummies would have at any one time). The amulets come from different periods but are excellent examples of their type. They are displayed in front of Harwa to represent an approximate positioning of funerary amulets upon the mummified body, inside the wrappings. In fact, in Harwa’s X-rays I have a difficult time finding clear indications of even a single amulet in his wrappings. Not all people used them in burial.

Harwa’s age at death is inconsistent in published material: I’ve seen a range anywhere from early 30s to around 60. While most of us familiar with Harwa tend to favor the older age at death, to my knowledge a properly trained forensic expert has never examined the mummy or its X-rays. When you gaze upon his face, you tend to see that of an elderly man—and 60 years would’ve been very elderly in a time when most males in the Near East averaged about 35 years of life.

An unusual fact about Harwa is that he was the first mummy to be flown on an airplane and the first to be publicly displayed by X-ray (Martin 1941: 386-388). In the early 1940s the Field Museum loaned him to a special General Electric exhibit in New York where he was displayed behind a fluoroscope that would automatically light up at timed intervals, to reveal the skeleton inside the wrappings.

Harwa has been X-rayed more than once through the years, as have many of our Egyptian and Peruvian mummies at the Field Museum. In the late 1970s Harwa was the subject of a medical analysis at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, where researchers examined X-ray images and took a biopsy of his right hip to search for signs of disease. Their conclusion is that in life Harwa suffered from ochronosis, a disease causing acid buildup in connective tissues and leading to calcification of some joints and articular surfaces. The researchers found this most notable in the narrowing of Harwa’s hips and knees and by the dark-stained deposits in his vertebra (Stenn et al 1977: 566-568), which looked to be calcified.

Lateral X-ray of Harwa; note the density of the intervertebral discs

Similar conclusions have been reached in many other Egyptian mummies in museums around the world, but more modern analyses might indicate otherwise. The world-leading center for the scientific study of Egyptian mummies is the Manchester Museum in northern England. Their scientists have been engaged in advanced and sophisticated scientific examinations of mummies for 40 years. Researchers at Manchester have noted that the finding of ochronosis might be incorrect, and might be better explained by changes in images of the body caused by the mummification process itself, largely due to imaging contrast issues (Adams & Alsop 2008: 38).

Harwa’s face is that of a serene and dignified elderly man. He almost appears to be asleep:

The face of Harwa

The preservation is practically perfect. The only damage is a missing little patch of skin above his right eye (not visible in the above photo), which exposes a bit of the frontal bone of his skull. That is likely to be the result of relatively modern damage, from the unwrapping of his head. It isn’t clear whether Harwa’s head was unwrapped before he even came to Chicago in 1904, or at some point in the early years of the museum’s possession. In any case it is no longer the practice to unwrap mummies most anywhere in the world, due to changes in ethical attitudes and, perhaps even more so, to the availability and superiority of CT scans as a tool to study mummies.

Some ancient damage is evident to Harwa’s nose. It is common to see collapsed noses on mummies such as Harwa, due in part to the pressure of the bandages simply collapsing the cartilage through time. But if you stand before Harwa and look carefully at his right nostril (not visible in the above photo), you will notice a large tear. This artifact is damage from the ancient embalming procedure of excerebration, by which the embalmers thrust a hooked rod up the nostril and into the skull to remove the brain matter a bit at a time.

The above image gives you a hint of how densely Harwa is wrapped by linen material, which is also evident as the dense white material outside the body cavity in the X-ray image above. Generally the body was first wrapped by thin strips of linen, after which any number of burial shrouds might have been wrapped fully around the body. As was common in the Late Period, both Harwa and his bandages were coated with dense deposits of hot pine resins (both to seal the body and to glue the wrappings together).

Harwa appears to have undergone an elaborate and expensive mummification. In this late stage of Egyptian history mummification standards were slipping, and one tends to find fewer well-preserved bodies compared to somewhat earlier periods when the mummification process had been perfected to a high art. Included in Harwa’s embalming was the traditional removal of internal organs: stomach, liver, lungs, and intestines. Unlike the ruined brain that had been removed through the nose, these four organs were preserved. They remain forever with Harwa, wrapped into four bundles between his legs:

Full frontal X-ray of Harwa; note the four bundles between his legs

Many readers are probably familiar with the four Canopic jars in which the embalmers traditionally placed the four organs. This practice had been largely discontinued at the end of the New Kingdom (c. 1068 BCE), perhaps because tomb raiders often smashed and destroyed the vessels (and the organs within them). While Canopic jars were still being produced and would continue as such for a long period of time, they were usually left empty or the stone from which they were made not even hollowed out. The organs in the later periods were often restored to the body cavity or placed between the legs (Ikram & Dodson 1998: 289).

So with Harwa we have a man upwards of sixty years of age who lived in the late seventh century BCE. He is extremely well preserved. Harwa’s exposed flesh is hairless, which might be due to his job in life (see below) or the putative practice of shaving off the hair for mummification and burial. Certainly not all Egyptian mummies are bald, but Harwa himself is indeed smooth.

The cause of death is unknown. Many of our mummies in storage have been CT scanned, which sometimes is a better diagnostic tool for finding evidence of disease, but Harwa has not been and nothing stands out in his skeleton. As stated, the old finding of ochronosis might be in error and wouldn’t have been fatal in any case. At some point it’s possible Harwa will be CT scanned by our curators, and perhaps then some evidence of pathology will present itself.

The coffin of Harwa

The elaborate coffin in which Harwa was buried is typical of an upper-class man from Dynasty 25 or Dynasty 26. It further confirms Harwa’s elite standing and wealth in his culture, at a time when most people still could not afford mummification and its requisite, costly burial equipment.

Coffin of Harwa

Unfortunately the coffin is difficult to photograph well because of the dim lighting of the display as well as the faded texts and vignettes, but one can begin to appreciate how expensive such a coffin would be. Unlike many coffins, it’s possible this one was custom made for Harwa. It’s covered with depictions of deities and other scenes and lengthy religious texts, many of them excerpts from Book of the Dead spells (a fairly common feature of Late Period coffins). Altogether the coffin’s design and iconography confirm that it comes from the Theban necropolis (the same massive burial ground where the great New Kingdom pharaohs were buried centuries earlier, in the Valley of the Kings).

The beard jutting from the chin is not the sort men actually wore in life, but is a symbol of Osiris, the god who ruled the underworld. The same is true for the green face, which is actually an unusual feature, but Osiris was also a fertility god associated with the fecundity of the Nile Valley crops.

On the coffin’s midriff is a funerary scene:

Funerary scene on the front of the coffin

Harwa is shown as a mummy lying on his funeral bed. At his head is the goddess Nephthys and at his feet Isis, both of whom raise their hands to their foreheads in a grieving gesture. Below the funeral bed are the four Canopic jars, even though Harwa’s stomach, liver, lungs, and intestines are wrapped up in four bundles between his legs (see X-ray above). And above him flutters a human-headed bird, which represents Harwa’s ba—that aspect of the soul embodying one’s character and personality.

It was believed that this aspect of the soul needed to return to the mummified body at dusk, where it would remain safe through the hours of night. The funerary scene and hieroglyphic texts on the lower portion of the coffin come from Spell 89 of the Book of the Dead. Placing them here ensured that Harwa’s ba would indeed safely return to his mummy every evening before the sun set.

On Harwa’s chest is a beautiful depiction of the winged goddess Nut:

The goddess Nut, wings spread to protect Harwa

She spreads her wings as though to protect Harwa, and in each hand she clutches the ankh symbol (eternal life). Note the pair of eyes flanking the goddess’s head. These are the eyes of Horus and were typical on coffins from significantly earlier periods of pharaonic history, as a means to allow the soul within the coffin to see out. On Harwa’s coffin they’re an archaic feature typical of this later period, even though the face of the coffin has a set of human eyes.

Note also the disk atop Nut’s head. It contains tiny hieroglyphs which spell her name (nwt). Above the disk is the bottom edge of the floral collar painted onto the coffin. The fact that the disk with glyphs lies just below the collar instead of intersecting it, allows Egyptologists to date the coffin to around 625 BCE or later (Taylor 2003: 115). This is how specific coffin typology can be, due to the development of iconography down through time. To reinforce this date, there are 22 deities depicted laterally down the sides of Harwa’s legs, another feature of the time. This is why I personally would date Harwa to about 600 BCE and to Dynasty 26 instead of Dynasty 25.

Down the front of Harwa’s legs are seven vertical bands reading top to bottom, right to left. The farthest right band is specific to Harwa and his family line (while much of the rest of the lengthy inscription comes from the Book of the Dead, as noted above). I’ve reproduced the hieroglyphs in the rightmost register:

The inscription reads: “Doorkeeper in the Temple of Amun, Harwa, the justified; son (of) the doorkeeper in the Temple of Amun, Pakharukhonsu, the justified; (who is the) son of Harwa, the justified. His mother, lady of the house, Medi-Iun, the justified.”

In life, then, Harwa was a doorkeeper in the Temple of Amun, the largest and most prestigious temple in Egypt. His father, Pakharukhonsu, held the same title before him. Pakharukhonsu’s father (and Harwa’s grandfather) was also named Harwa, so perhaps it was a family name—although it was common to name one’s son after one’s father. And Harwa’s mother was named Medi-Iun.

The name Harwa appears to be Semitic in origin, with the root H-L-W. It’s attested since Akkadian times under the form elelu and probably means “Beautiful Because Sweet” (Teeter, Gaudard, & Tradritti 2013). Some linguists argue that most or all ancient Egyptian dialects lacked the sound “L,” which might explain why it is rendered the way it is in Egyptian inscriptions.

The Temple of Amun (modern Luxor) was an extremely powerful and wealthy institution. As with any large state temple it would’ve had an army of employees, and doorkeepers were of a lower rank (Erman 1894: 304). However, it’s important to understand that the position was more for the sake of prestige than for income, and in fact it’s altogether possible the family’s personal wealth and standing are what landed his father and then him in that position. Typically only the highest-class citizens were involved with the great temples. And it’s clear Harwa was very proud of this: his name and title are repeated many times over the surfaces of his coffin.

I should note that published materials also describe Harwa as the overseer of an agricultural estate owned by the Temple of Amun. Given that the great temples—and especially Amun’s—owned vast agricultural lands in the Nile Valley to make themselves self-sufficient, this is quite plausible. However, I have never been able to find this fact in the visible inscriptions, so until such time that I am able to see and translate it, I shall refrain from claiming that title for Harwa.

It’s only a pity that the coffin is so close to the back wall of the display case; otherwise, we could note whether there are inscriptions on the back, too. This was common for elaborate coffins of the Late Period. I’ve always wished the curators who designed the exhibit had stuck a large mirror behind the coffin.

Harwa’s coffin is a true masterpiece, fitting for an elite man in the Late Period of Egypt. Together with his incredibly preserved mummy, it’s clear Harwa was a wealthy and comfortable man. He is one of the greatest treasures of our Egyptian collection, and I’ve spent years discussing him with enthralled museum visitors. One might say Harwa is our rock star.

Taylor, John H. “Theban coffins from the Twenty-second to the Twenty-sixth Dynasty: dating and synthesis of development.” The Theban Necropolis: Past, Present and Future. ed. Nigel Strudwick and John H. Taylor. 2003.

On the translation of Harwa’s name: Personal correspondence with Emily Teeter and Francois Gaudard of the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago; personal correspondence with Francesco Tradritti, Field Director of the Harwa Mission, Università di Enna Unikore. 2013.

Recently for practice I translated an ancient Egyptian stela on display at the Oriental Institute in Chicago, Illinois. It’s a large and colorful stela of an official named Uha, and it’s unusual in that it contains information about his circumcision. I had never translated a monument with this aspect of the ancient culture, so was interested in seeing what it had to say in the original ancient language.

Along the way I spent some time researching the subject and thought it might be worthwhile to compose an article about it. There is a lot of interesting information out there, and I noted that some of it on the internet is misleading or incorrect. I also was reminded of the polarizing effect the subject of circumcision has on modern people, some of whom are not disturbed by it, some of whom find it “barbaric,” and others who regard the practice as a religious or cultural norm.

My article for the most part will be limited to the subject of circumcision as it pertains to ancient Egypt.

The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the mid fifth century BCE, stated the Egyptians “practise circumcision for the sake of cleanliness, considering it better to be cleanly than comely.” He also wrote: “They [Egyptians] are the only people in the world—they at least, and such as have learnt the practice from them—who use circumcision.”

Were we to take Herodotus at his word, then, we might think circumcision was a universal male practice in ancient Egypt and that the Egyptians invented the practice. But neither case can be stated absolutely. No one knows who first instituted the act of circumcision, and it certainly was not a universal practice among males. Examinations of mummies has shown, however, that circumcision was commonly practiced (Filer 1995: 90) among ancient Egyptian males.

Try as I might, I could find no corroboration that female circumcision was practiced in ancient Egypt. Examinations of female mummies have not revealed evidence of circumcision (Aufderheide 2003: 474). What we can say with a high level of confidence, then, is that circumcision in ancient Egypt was a male practice.

The prevailing evidence shows that circumcision was conducted in the pre-adolescent stage of a male’s life. This is borne out in textual evidence as well as in the examinations of male mummies. As with other African peoples to this day, it was not done in infancy but perhaps in some cases marked an initiation rite between boyhood and manhood. At the same time, there is no extant evidence that circumcision was required for all males; likewise, there is no evidence that circumcision was governed by one’s social class or status (Nunn 2002: 171).

Not even all of the kings appear to have been circumcised, in so far as it is observable on their mummies. Consider Ahmose I (1549-1524 BCE), founder of Dynasty 18 and the New Kingdom:

Mummy of Ahmose I, Dynasty 18

Kings were of course at the peak of social hierarchy, the epitome of manhood, and the divine intermediaries of the gods. It has been speculated that perhaps Ahmose wasn’t circumcised because he was sickly or suffered from hemophilia (Harris & Weeks 1973: 127), but other kings such as Amunhotep I and Amunhotep II also appear not to have been circumcised. The more plausible scenario is that it wasn’t a cultural absolute.

As a museum docent I am sometimes faced with odd or somewhat embarrassing questions. Such questions are often (though not always) posed by children. On display in our Egyptian exhibit at the Field Museum is the unwrapped mummy of a boy who died around 2,500 years ago, at ten to twelve years of age:

Late Period mummy of a boy (Field Museum)

One afternoon I came across a young boy of around seven who was squatting down and studying what he could see below the hands of this mummy. The mummy is so well preserved that his genitals are intact. The young museum visitor looked up at me and asked why this mummified boy was not circumcised. I’ve never paid much attention to what one can see below the mummy’s hands and am not inclined to now, either, but my first thought upon this young boy’s question to me was, Where are this kid’s parents? To cut it short I answered frankly that not everyone was circumcised, and then pretended to be caught up by another group of visitors.

While on the subject of museums, let’s return to the stela of Uha on display at the Oriental Institute:

Stela of Uha, First Intermediate Period (Oriental Institute)

The stela comes from the site of Nag ed-Deir and dates to the First Intermediate Period (c. 2100 BCE). It shows Uha in his kilt and broadcollar and clutching a sekhem-scepter (emblem of power); behind Uha, in diminutive size, stands his wife Henutsen, who affectionately clasps Uha’s hand. Uha carries numerous titles in the lengthy horizontal inscription, among them seal bearer of the king and lector priest. The fourth and fifth registers are specific to his circumcision.

The translation is my own but can be compared against the published translation in the O.I.’s companion book to the exhibit (Teeter 2003: 34): iw sab.k Hna s(w) 120 nn.s xaA nn.s xAw im nn AXa im nnw AXa im (“When I was circumcised, along with 120 men, none therein struck, none therein were struck; none therein scratched, none therein were scratched”). Basically Uha is bragging that neither he nor his male companions struggled or had to be forced in their circumcisions. This is a common theme in the few monuments which mention circumcision, but what makes the stela unusual is that Uha was apparently in the company of 120 other men (Hna s[w] 120). Mass circumcisions are otherwise unattested in ancient Egyptian monuments. If such an occasion did occur, it must have been a highly unpleasant sight to behold.

Incidentally, in my preparations for conducting my translation, I broke one of my own rules and turned to the internet, just to see what was out there. It turns out Uha’s stela is easy to find on the web, and there are numerous translations. On several I came across mention that there were “120 men and 120 women” on the day of the mass circumcision. This is incorrect. While the stela clearly mentions the figure of 120 men, no women are mentioned in the group. As noted earlier, evidence is lacking that females underwent circumcision in ancient Egypt.

Considering the impressive length of pharaonic history and the practically countless inscribed monuments, circumcision is not well represented historically in ancient Egypt. There are only two monuments which specifically depict the act of circumcision: in the tomb of Ankhmahor at Saqqara and in the temple precinct of Mut at Karnak (Filer 1995: 90). Other monuments such as Uha’s mention circumcision but do not depict it. Circumcision is not mentioned in the extant medical papyri (ibid).

The depiction in Ankhmahor’s tomb is worth reviewing. Dating to Dynasty 6 and specifically to the reign of King Teti (2355-2343 BCE), it is the oldest extant depiction of the act of circumcision from ancient Egypt. Here is a line-art version of the depiction, which appears on the east thickness of a doorway in the tomb:

Tomb relief showing circumcision, Saqqara

Ankhmahor was a high-ranking official whose tomb was small but beautifully decorated with relief carvings. It is found in the pyramid complex of Teti. His titles included overseer of all the king’s works, overseer of the two treasuries, priest of Maat, and lector priest (Kanawati, N. & A. Hassan 1997: 11-12).

The above scene depicts two men being circumcised. The scene has been interpreted in different ways but the nude male at right is surmounted by an inscription in which he says: sin wnnt r mnx (“Sever, indeed, thoroughly”). The man kneeling before him says: iw(.i) r irt r nDm (“I will proceed carefully”).

All our male readers are probably squirming by now. At left is one man restraining the nude male there, while another kneels before him to preform the procedure. The glyphs in front of the kneeling man identify him as a Hm-kA, mortuary priest. In the inscription he is telling the man doing the restraining: nDr sw m rdi dbA.f (“Hold him fast. Do not let him faint”). The restrainer says: iri.i r Hst.k (“I will do as you wish”).

(These translations are from Kanawati, N. & A. Hassan 1997: 49.)

The nude male at left is not given lines. Presumably he is doing everything he can not to pass out. This is understandable.

As I mentioned, the depiction has been interpreted in different ways. Below the elbows of the restrained male at left is the word sb, which is typically translated as “circumcise.” The Egyptologist Ann Macy Roth has plausibly argued that this word should act together with Hm-kA to form the sentence sbt Hm-kA (“Circumcising the mortuary priest”), which makes the restrained nude male at left the mortuary priest (Nunn 2002: 170-171).

Roth’s proposal makes sense because it’s otherwise confusing why a mortuary priest should be performing circumcisions. The scene as a whole is somewhat odd in its context because, while the tomb of Ankhmahor shows other scenes involving medical care, the circumcision depiction is isolated on a door thickness and does not even include Ankhmahor. It’s been argued that one or both of the nude males might be sons of Ankhmahor, who are depicted elsewhere in the tomb.

In an entirely different interpretation, it’s been stated that perhaps the man at right isn’t being circumcised but is undergoing a procedure to correct phimosis. In other cases it’s been argued that the same man is undergoing a procedure to numb his penis prior to being circumcised.

So it remains unclear under what circumstances a male in ancient Egypt would be circumcised. While it seems clear Herodotus’ accounts of the practice are exaggerated, the fact is many men were circumcised (again, evidently in late puberty). It might come down to how some people in ancient Egypt viewed purity rites. To the ancient Egyptians purity was not so much a state of mind as it was a physical phenomenon (Teeter 2011: 32). There are scattered references that circumcision was an act of physical purity (ibid), and I personally have always wondered if it was a preference or perhaps an obligation among men in certain priestly classes. Recall that in both our examples here—Uha and Ankmahor—these men carried priestly titles.

Remember that in both ancient times and modern, circumcision has been a fixed cultural feature and an act of initiation into manhood. While some modern people find the practice “barbaric,” it is not one’s place to force his or her attitudes into someone else’s cultural or religious beliefs.

Around the year 1343 BCE a young boy came to the throne of Egypt. He was the last male heir in a long and powerful line of kings we today call the Tuthmosids, but he was only around eight years old. He followed on the heels of almost twenty years of social upheaval at the hands of Akhenaten, a king uniformly reviled by the pharaohs who succeeded him. Akhenaten had tried to install something akin to a henotheism or even monotheism in a culture that had been solidly polytheistic for millennia. Given that this young king, a boy called Tutankhaten, was too young to exercise real power or leadership, his powerful advisors and officials found themselves in a very convenient situation: they could use the little king to restore tradition and bring back the enormous cult of the proscribed deity Amun. And that’s exactly what they did.

One of the first things these officials did was change the boy-king’s name to Tutankhamun, “Living Image of Amun,” to help establish the fact that Amun was back. They married him to an older half-sister named Ankhesenpaaten, whose name was changed to Ankhesenamun, “She Lives for Amun.” They moved the nation’s capital from Akhenaten’s purpose-built city of Akhetaten back to Waset, the traditional religious capital of pharaonic Egypt. It is better known today as Thebes. (The modern place name is Luxor.) The god Akhenaten had venerated and whom he had forced upon Egypt as the new state deity, the Aten, was not proscribed but instead was returned to its former status as a minor aspect of the great sun deity Re. As for Akhenaten himself, the old king was branded a heretic and his name was not to be mentioned again; henceforth he was to be called “the criminal of Akhetaten.” The city of Akhetaten itself swiftly waned and fell into ruin, most of its stone temples and monuments disassembled down to their foundations by later kings and used as fill within the walls of massive temple pylons in the vast temple complex of Amun.

So came the reign of Tutankhamun, the boy-king. In our modern world he is synonymous with ancient Egypt. Most everyone has heard of him. To most people Tutankhamun is the most famous pharaoh of that long-ago civilization. He was certainly not the only one to come to the throne as a child in ancient Egypt, but the average modern person is not likely to be as aware of other boy-kings such as Pepi II.

The irony is, Tutankhamun was a minor king. He was something of a footnote in the history of ancient Egypt. He was likely forgotten within several generations of his own lifetime. This is largely due to two facts: he reigned for only around a decade and died at about eighteen years of age, and he was, after all, from the royal line of the reviled “criminal of Akhetaten” and was subsequently erased from their own history. Tutankhamun does not appear on any of the ancient kings lists of that great civilization. He was meant to be forgotten. We are not certain exactly how Tutankhamun was related to Akhenaten: many if not most historians used to believe he was the son of the heretic, but recent genetic testing has thrown that into significant doubt. That’s perhaps another story, but the point is, he was from the line of the heretic, so his fate was to be damned to eternal obscurity.

Until, that is, Tutankhamun’s tomb was found in 1922. Designated KV62 (Kings Valley Tomb 62), it was the first royal tomb to be found almost intact. Not completely intact, mind you, because it had been raided at least twice, but great quantities of burial goods were found in KV62: almost 5,400 objects packed into a rather ignominious little tomb the size of the average modern garage. No royal tomb unearthed to that point in time had been anywhere near as spectacular.

This is what has made Tutankhamun—King Tut—so famous in our own time. KV62 is one of the greatest archaeological discoveries in history and the event made its discoverer, a rather surly Brit named Howard Carter, a household name. He and Tut are forever linked in the annals of Egyptology.

But why did Tutankhamun reign for only ten years? What felled this king at such a young age? This is a question that has persisted in archaeology and the wider scientific community since the day the mummy was first unwrapped. And it is what we’re going to explore here.

I should caution before proceeding that to this day there is no universal agreement on any single explanation for the cause of death of this young king. It continues to be debated. I’ll share my own belief, but it is only one of many. They range from scientifically astute to absurd. Few ancient bodies have been as poked and prodded as the mummy of King Tut, but it does provide clues. So, first I think it best to go back to the beginning, to the first time the mummy was examined.

The Original Autopsy in 1925

Three years passed after Howard Carter discovered KV62 before his team got around to unwrapping and examining the mummy itself. The autopsy was led by an anatomist named Douglass Derry, who had considerable experience working with Egyptian mummies. The irony is, as meticulous as Carter was in painstakingly clearing the artifacts from the tomb, the autopsy was botched. Significant damage was done to the mummy of Tutankhamun. The mummy had been so thickly coated with resins and unguents when placed in its nested coffins 3,300 years ago that it was stuck fast when Derry, Carter, and the others tried to remove it. They ended up disassembling the mummy into numerous pieces. The head came off after a myriad of attempts to pry off the king’s iconic gold burial mask.

The mummy itself was in sorry shape even before Carter came along. As he notes in his publications, both the wrappings and body were heavily carbonized (Carter 2003 ed: 174, 198). This was evidently a chemical reaction due to the layers of resins and unguents that had been applied to the body in the mummification process, and was not associated with any antemortem condition or injury. It contributed to the fragmentation of the mummy during the rough handling in the autopsy.

Carter immediately observed that the mummy was that of a young man but there was no obvious sign of cause of death during the examination (ibid 198). Derry noted a fracture to the left distal femur, to the extent that the left patella (knee cap) was quite loose. It was placed in the mummy’s left hand when the autopsy was completed. The poor condition of the body presented many cracks and fractures, but given the limitations of the time it wasn’t clear if the fracture to the left leg happened before or at the time of death, or if it was the result of rough handling on the part of the embalmers 3,300 years ago.

Carter had hoped to X-ray the mummy of Tutankhamun, but the radiographer died on his way to Egypt.

The team built a tray, filled it with sand, and carefully reassembled the mummy within the sand. This was placed back into one of the coffins and finally into the quartzite sarcophagus, evidently with the hope that no one would notice the fragmented condition of the body.

The First X-rays: Evidence for Murder?

The first X-rays of King Tut were shot in 1968. This was conducted by a team from the University of Liverpool, and led by R.G. Harrison. Further X-rays were shot in 1978 by the University of Michigan, led by James E. Harris. In both cases the X-ray machine was brought to the tomb itself. That said, Harrison’s project was the first time the mummy had been viewed since Carter’s excavation over forty years earlier. Understandably Harrison was surprised to find the mummy in such poor condition; Carter’s little secret was out.

The series of X-rays revealed a number of things, including the oddity that the king’s sternum and frontal ribs were missing. This is a significant and often misunderstood point to which we will be returning. But it was the radiographs of the king’s skull that drew the most attention—at least later on. Neither Harrison nor Harris posited a clear cause of death but images of the skull showed an unusual difference in density to the base of the occipital bone (the bulge at the back of the skull) and a couple of loose bone fragments rattling around in there.

X-ray of King Tut’s skull. Note the loose bone fragment within. The arrow points to the base of the occipital bone.

In March 1999 a researcher named Bob Brier published a book entitled The Murder of Tutankhamen. Brier is not strictly an Egyptologist but is nonetheless a noted leader in the field of paleopathological studies of Egyptian mummies. He is also the first person to have mummified a human body since ancient times, for the sake of a scientific experiment. The experiment was highly successful and earned Brier the nickname of Mr. Mummy.

Brier had observed and studied the X-rays from 1968 and 1978, and wondered at the possibility of assassination. He is hardly the first to posit the idea of Tut’s having been murdered—the idea surfaced almost as quickly as the 1925 autopsy, given how young Tut was when he died. This coupled with the heretical line from which Tutankhamun came, has long made the idea plausible. Brier explored the idea in his book to a depth never before attempted (see Brier 1999). Was it Aye, the shrewd and old official who in fact succeeded Tut on the throne? Or was it Horemheb, the general of the army and thus a very powerful man?

Brier enlisted the aid of an expert investigator who suggested the difference in density to the base of the occipital bone might indicate a subdural hematoma, the result of a vicious blow to the head that resulted in coma and death. Then there are the loose bone fragments—more evidence of a blow to the head.

The idea of subdural hematoma struck me as somewhat plausible. What didn’t, however, was the bone fragments rattling around in the skull. When Tut was mummified late in Dynasty 18 the embalmers removed his brain through his nose, as was commonly done in elite mummifications. Then two courses of resin were poured into the cranial vault, another technique commonly used by ancient embalmers. This is evident in radiographs as opaque masses that solidified at the back as well as the top of the cranial vault.

X-ray showing the courses of hardened resin as a white, opaque mass at the back and top of the cranial vault.

What struck me as decidedly odd is, if the loose bone fragments resulted from a vicious blow to the head, why were the fragments not well embedded into the resin? So back then, while I personally considered assassination as a possibility, I myself was not completely certain of the scenario.

Raging Hippo, Panicked Horse?

A physician named R.W. Harer presented two odd explanations for Tut’s death. The first, in 2006, involved a hippo crushing Tut’s chest in its powerful jaws. The second, in 2011, posited that a horse kicked Tut, collapsing the chest cavity with fatal results (Rühli & Ikram 2013: 8). Both theories were presented at conferences of ARCE (American Research Center in Egypt). Neither theory is impossible. To this day the hippopotamus is one of the most dangerous animals in Africa, and its jaws could easily crush a man. And who knows how many people down through time have been killed by panicked horses?

Harer based his theories on the odd nature of the chest of Tut’s mummy. As I mentioned when describing the original X-ray imaging, the sternum and frontal ribs were missing when the body was examined in 1968. Carter never mentions this condition in his thorough notes, so that has been left unexplained. Harer wasn’t the first to focus on the damaged chest; another researcher explained it as possibly the result of a horrendous chariot accident. The chest was so crushed that the embalmers 3,300 years ago had no choice but to remove and discard the shattered sternum and ribs.

Here is a CT scan image showing the condition of the chest:

CT scan showing missing sternum and ribs, as well as other damage (adapted from Kmt magazine).

The frontal ribs were clearly cut away with a saw. Was this the result of “cleaning-up” work of ancient embalmers, or something else? Also notable is the absence of clavicles (collar bones). Moreover, there appears to be no evidence for the remains of Tut’s heart. The embalmers usually made every attempt to leave the heart in the thoracic cavity (for religious reasons), and though they weren’t always successful, every attempt would be made for a king, certainly.

In my opinion this mystery has been successfully solved, thanks primarily to a careful examination of archival photos conducted in 2007 (see Forbes, Ikram, and Kamrin, 51-56).

Howard Carter’s excavation photographer was Harry Burton, who was one of the finest archaeological photographers of his day. As Carter painstakingly cleared the king’s tomb in the 1920s, Burton photographed everything. This includes the mummy during the autopsy process. Below is a closeup of one of Burton’s photos of the unwrapped mummy prior to reinterment in KV62:

Original photo (1926) of the king’s mummy (adapted from Kmt magazine).

Compare this image with the previous one. In 1926 the chest was still intact. The clavicles were still in place. Note also the beaded cap on the mummified head, which is entirely absent in the previous CT scan image. Over the chest are several necklaces which Carter records in his notes as deliberately left in place because they were stuck firm within the resins coating the body. Perhaps the same was true for the beaded cap. Lastly, note the remains of eyelids. Compare this with a modern photo of Tut’s head:

Head of Tutankhamun as it is today.

In sum total, theories for ancient damage to the chest are probably best abandoned. Something must have happened between 1926, when the mummy was reinterred, and 1968, when it was next officially studied for the purpose of X-raying. In the interim was an event that involved nearly the entire planet: World War II. The theory is that during the war, when in fact the ancient tombs of Egypt were left largely unguarded, modern raiders entered the tomb to retrieve the embedded necklaces and beaded cap from the mummy. They cut through the chest to keep the necklaces intact, causing great damage, and roughly handled the head to remove the beaded cap (thus the frail eyelids disintegrated).

I agree with this theory. It best fists the available evidence thanks to Burton’s photos in 1926 and Harrison’s in 1968. On another note, Burton’s photos show that the king’s penis is intact, while the 1968 photos show it went missing, having broken off the body. It was later found within the bed of sand on which the mummy lies.

Disease?

A recent paper has thoroughly summarized the myriad of diseases different researchers through the years have suggested for Tut’s demise (Rühli & Ikram 2013). We needn’t delve into all of them, but a brief summary is in order. Through the years a number of researchers have posited all manner of ailments, including Marfan syndrome. This one was primarily due to the decidedly odd appearance of artwork in the Amarna Period, the period to which Akhenaten belongs:

Amarna Period stela of Akhenaten and Nefertiti

Akhenaten, his queen Nefertiti, and their daughters (as well as nobility in many cases) are shown with spindly limbs, long digits, drooping faces, overly full lips, wide hips, and pendulous breasts. Some of these characteristics do tend to fit Marfan. However, analysis of royal mummies from the Amarna Period have never shown indications of Marfan syndrome, so this is unlikely. It is more the consensus today that the odd human forms in the bodies of Amarna figures is a religious-artistic expression based on Akhenaten’s religious reforms, in a manner to express androgyny in the human form.

Some researchers have posited Klinefelter’s syndrome, Froehlich’s syndrome, or other disorders of the sort. The main problem here is that such disorders tend to cause infertility, and we know Akhenaten had six daughters (ibid 10). This cannot be the case for Akhenaten, but what if his line passed one of these disorders along to Tut? This also is implausible. Genetic studies of Amarna mummies conducted from 2007 to 2010 have fairly well confirmed that the two still-born infant girls found in KV62 in the 1920s are in fact Tut’s daughters (Hawass et al 2010: 641).

The same genetic tests revealed some interesting things about Tutankhamun, however. Macroscopic studies as well as genetic material have revealed traces of malaria tropica in the boy-king. This may not be what killed him, but it certainly would have weakened him and led to troubled health. On the other hand, in ancient times malaria often would have been fatal, if advanced enough. Also, CT scans during these examinations revealed two metatarsals in the king’s left foot with clear signs of deformation consistent with osteonecrosis (bone death) (ibid 642-643). This infection might also not have caused the king’s death, but there would have been no way in the Late Bronze Age to stop such infection and eventually it might have proved fatal had the king lived long enough. I’ll come back to that, but suffice it to say, by the time Tutankhamun died, he was already evidently weakened and ill.

The Original CT Scans: Questions Answered

Tutankhamun’s mummy was CT scanned for the first time in 2005. As with the X-rays and subsequent CT scanning, the device was brought to the tomb. The CT scanner kept overheating and there were jokes about the curse of King Tut, but several cheap fans aimed at the machine circumvented the curse.

Tut’s age at death has been variously estimated down through the years as anywhere between seventeen to twenty-seven years (Hawass 2005: 33). The CT scans in 2005 placed the estimate at eighteen or nineteen years of age at death, on which most researchers agree today.

The original CT scans is where the osteonecrosis of the left foot was first noticed. The king’s left foot was somewhat deformed and must have been painful. Telling is the fact that a great many walking sticks were found in the tomb when Carter cleared it in the 1920s. I was one, I must admit, who always pooh-poohed this as relevant to the king’s health because kings and noblemen were often buried with walking sticks. They were symbols of authority in pharaonic times. I should have known better. Tut’s tomb contained an overabundance of them. Subsequent analysis of these walking sticks show wear and tear to the tips of many of them, so clearly Tut needed them in life. His left foot was unstable.

The CT scans were very important in other ways. They were able to disprove a blow to the head as cause of death. Recall Bob Brier’s theory I mentioned earlier. The CT scans proved the difference in density at the base of the occipital bone was not related to any sort of injury. And the bone fragments rattling around in the cranial vault were identified as broken pieces of a cervical vertebra and part of the foramen magnum (ibid 34), the hole at the base of the skull through which the spinal cord passes. These fragments were more than likely broken loose in 1925 when Douglass Derry, Howard Carter, and the rest of the team were vigorously prying the gold burial mask off the mummy’s head.

As I mentioned earlier, during the original autopsy in 1925 Derry noticed a broken left leg. The fracture was at the epiphysis (growth plate) right above the left knee. The following images show the location of the fracture on the king’s leg:

Details of the king’s distal left femur. The arrow in the image at left points to the site of the fracture.

Now, the king’s body is covered with cracks and fractures, most hairline in nature. The mummy was found to be in poor shape in 1925. The carbonization that occurred naturally to the body down through time did a lot of damage. However, in this case, most of the scientists and researchers who examined the fracture were in agreement that the resins the embalmers had applied to the body during mummification, seeped into the wound itself. This means the wound must have been there prior to the mummification process.

This in turn indicates it must have been an injury sustained at or around the time of death.

What, Then, Killed King Tut?

I must stress again as I bring this to a close that there is no universal agreement on the cause of death of the famous boy-king. My article should make this much clear. However, I personally find much to agree with in the theory reached by Hawass and his team following the 2005 CT scans.

Tut was buried with six disassembled chariots in his tomb. He was clearly a typical teenager with a need for speed. Remember the left foot with the osteonecrosis, which is tied into this. A popular theory is that one day in the eighteenth year of Tutankhamun’s life, he was out riding one of his chariots when he hit a nasty bump. He was tossed upwards in the chariot, and came down on his unstable left foot, which couldn’t support his weight. He toppled out of the rapidly moving chariot and landed on his left leg, which shattered at the epiphyseal plate above the left knee. The damage was such that the kneecap was torn loose.

This would not have been survivable in the Late Bronze Age. While ancient Egyptian physicians were adept at treating many kinds of fractures, as is evident in human remains from that time, a compound fracture with such devastating injury would’ve been fatal. The fracture itself wasn’t the mechanism of death, but inevitable infection would have been. Tut more than likely died from gangrene.

Can we be sure it was a chariot accident? To this point in time no ancient Egyptian newspaper has been found reporting Tut’s lethal accident, but kidding aside, we can never be sure. It’s just a popular theory. Such an injury could just as easily been sustained in battle, perhaps from a Hittite battle axe, and there is evidence to suggest Tut himself led his army into battle at least once. But that, too, can only be a theory.

We will never know for certain how it happened, but I for one agree Tutankhamun died from infection after shattering his left leg 3,300 years ago.

I thank you for your time and attention. As always, I welcome comments and questions.

Archival photo from the New York Times, 1936. Note the giant skeleton nestled against the ruined wall.

Recent research led to a goldmine. A friend of mine who works in the archival department of the New York Times was looking for some information for an article on the history of archaeology in Egypt, when he came across the above image and the scanned article at right. The article dates to 1936 but does not mention the name of the staff writer. My friend prefers to remain anonymous (I’ll call him “Jonas”) because these items were in an old folder marked CONFIDENTIAL, and he doesn’t wish to get into trouble. A memo paper-clipped to the folder, Jonas explained in the email to which these items were attached, had words to the effect that this was deemed to be of a highly sensitive nature and was never meant for public consumption.

It’s possible whatever archaeological team was conducting the dig when the giant skeleton was unearthed, felt it better to keep everything secret. Probably the academic institution to which this team was attached was the impetus for the secrecy—academia does not like to upset its applecart. The article mentions a photographer named Henry Leichter who was working at the time for the University of Chicago (Oriental Institute), but neither Jonas nor I have been able to determine if it is this university which wished to bury the shocking discovery of 1936.

But due to my friend’s plucky spirit, it need be buried no more. He and I have brought the truth to light. I’m glad Jonas remembered my love of all things ancient Egyptian, and that I write this blog, so here we have found a way to publish what had been hidden from the public eye.

What’s more, everything in the above paragraphs is a steaming load of bullcrap. I made it up. All of it. I Photoshopped the photograph, as well as typed the “article” and used Photoshop to give it an aged look. It was quite fun. Oh, and I don’t have a friend who works for the New York Times. I don’t think I even know anyone who works for the New York Times.

You readers who are familiar with my blog either knew straight away that I was pulling your leg or must have quickly begun to wonder if I had fallen off the edge of sanity. But the above photo as well as the fake article are of the type you see all over the internet, on half-baked web pages professing to offer “proof” that the ancient world was populated by giant humans.

After all, giants are mentioned several times in the Old Testament (see Genesis 6:4 as an example). The Bible wouldn’t mislead us, would it? The original word in ancient Hebrew is Nephilim, which is most likely a loan word from the Aramaic naphil, which does in fact mean “giant” (see Heiser, sitchiniswrong.com). So it must be true, then, right?

Perhaps not. The day ancient religious texts are the sole means by which we analyze and study ancient civilizations, is the day on which we must concede that we’ve abandoned the greater amount of our common sense. I am not demeaning the Bible, mind you. It is rightfully the greatest book ever written, but it’s not a history book.

I’m sure many of you have seen the Photoshopped images I mentioned. Just Google “ancient giants” in Images and you come up with all sorts of hits. The following photo is a good example:

Some of these fake images are very well done, and I must admit many of them are better than the one I slapped together at the top of this article. This one here is quite realistic, except for the fact that the shadow of the skeleton in its pit and the shadow of the squatting man are extending in opposite directions. Quite a few of the fake photos out there have obvious mistakes. But many do not, and they look quite convincing.

That doesn’t make them authentic, of course. Anyone who has Photoshop, as well as most any sort of word-processing program to type out a “newspaper article” can put together real-looking images. Common sense alone is what should be the determining factor. Most of us will see such images and chuckle, but certain people out there will see such an image and think it’s rock-hard proof. That’s unfortunate.

Ancient Egypt is a favorite for the folks who want to believe in giants roaming the world of millennia ago. Certain things about the great pharaonic culture make it simple for the hoaxers to use Egypt, as well as for the gullible to fall for it.

For example, look at wall depictions of the great pharaohs. Here’s one of Ramesses II charing forth on his chariot into battle at Kadesh in Syria:

Ramesses II, Battle of Kadesh, Dynasty 19

This was an actual battle which took place in 1274 BCE, early in Ramesses’ reign. The Egyptians faced the Hittites at Kadesh, and although no clear winner was determined, Ramesses covered the walls of several temples with such battle scenes not only to make it seem as though the Egyptians had won but, of course, to show his own great prowess and courage.

Look below the figures of the rearing horses pulling Ramesses’ chariot. You will notice itty-bitty Hittite soldiers. They’re fleeing in the face of the great Egyptian pharaoh, who is clearly a literal giant because he is shown in the scene as towering above them.

The same sort of depiction is seen in countless Egyptian tombs and on funeral stelae and other monuments, such as this one dating to Dynasty 11 (2160-1781 BCE):

Scene from a Dynasty 11 funerary stela

It’s beautifully cut and inscribed. At right are seated a husband and wife in the act of receiving offerings. Chances are, both of them were deceased when this monument was made. But look to the left and you’ll see who’s presenting the offerings: tiny little servants. Clearly, then, it was not only the royals who were giants, but also many of the people in the ranks of the elite.

Many of you may be aware of why the ancient Egyptians produced art this way, but even so, if some of you readers do not know why this was done, I’m willing to bet you’re not going to chalk it up to giants. It’s that common sense thing, again.

For those who would like to know the explanation, it’s due to a principle modern art historians call hierarchical scaling. Whether the ancient Egyptians even had a word for it is not of importance, because it was simply part of their artistic traditions and practices from the very dawn of their kingdom at the end of the fourth millennium BCE. Basically, in any scene where more than one person was shown, the figure of most importance and greatest status in that scene was usually depicted as physically larger than the other people (Robins 2008: 21). The bigger the better, in other words. Kings are usually shown the largest in any given scene, of course, with the exception of deities appearing in the same scene; in such cases the king is often shown at the same scale as deities, but any other human figure usually will look diminutive. Where a male and female are shown together, often the male is shown larger, including depictions of kings and queens. This was not a universal practice, of course, as you can see in the stela of the husband and wife above. And on occasion kings and queens when shown together were sometimes of equal size, which is evident in the artwork of several pharaohs such as Amunhotep III and Queen Tiye, Akhenaten and Queen Nefertiti, and Ramesses II and Queen Nefertari.

But the pro-giants crowd will find exceptions to the rule. The following scene is often used to show ancient giants:

Scene from the tomb of Rekhmire, Dynasty 18

I’ve seen this scene used to show that even regular workmen could be giants. A handy thing to have around for all of those huge buildings the Egyptians erected. The giants crowd would have you believe this is a depiction of workmen cutting blocks of masonry, and carrying them with ease, for the building of the Great Pyramid. (I’ve also seen this depiction used by the crowd which believes the Great Pyramid was composed of blocks made from a poured synthetic stone, which is being produced here—an idea with little scientific corroboration and perhaps the subject of a future article for me.)

The scene comes from the tomb of Rekhmire, a powerful nobleman who served as a vizier under both Tuthmosis III and Amunhotep II, in Dynasty 18. He lived around 1420 BCE. His tomb (TT100) is in western Thebes, the most popular burial ground through most of the New Kingdom. TT100 is particularly famous for its rich depictions of all manner of workmen and craftsmen performing their labors, under the steady supervision of the great vizier himself.

What we have here is a good example of people in the fringe camp seeing an image but not knowing how to interpret it, nor decipher what it meant to the ancient Egyptians. I rather doubt the ancients would care how someone living over 3,000 years later would understand such scenes, other than to be offended by extremes in misdirection.

The Great Pyramid was built around 2500 BCE, in Dynasty 4. Again, Rekhmire was a nobleman of Dynasty 18, over a thousand years after the time of the Great Pyramid. By Rekhmire’s time, in fact, pyramids were no longer even part of royal burials. The religion of the state had changed considerably since the days of the Old Kingdom.

As is the case with so many ancient tomb depictions, the figures in TT100 are accompanied by hieroglyphic captions which explain what they’re doing. In the case of the scene shown above, the caption for these workers states that they’re “Molding bricks to build a magazine anew [for the Temple] of Karnak” (Hodel-Hoenes 2000: 162). It’s notable that the Karnak temple is explicitly mentioned, which alone discounts any connection with the Great Pyramid or any other monument far to the north at Giza. A “magazine” is a modern term used to describe the ancient Egyptian word for storehouse. These ancient storehouses were often made from small mud bricks, which the men are shown making and carrying. The men themselves comprise a group of Syrian and Nubian prisoners of war (ibid); such men were often bought back to Egypt as labor-slaves. So, no, they’re not giants.

Even animals are singled out as “giants.” You might have noticed this with the horses pulling Ramesses’ chariot in the earlier photo—even the horses are much larger than the Hittite enemies over whom they are rearing. But you will see many images in which animals appear to be gigantic, sometimes even towering over royals:

Relief showing the goddess Hathor in bovine form

Here a pharaoh is shown drinking from the utters of an enormous cow—certain proof that giant animals once roamed the Nile Valley? No, probably not. Inscriptions are not evident in this scene and it’s not like I have all of them memorized, but based on the iconography of the cow (e.g., sun disk and diminutive king) I think I’m safe in identifying it as the common bovine manifestation of the goddess Hathor. As with other important deities Hathor had a very busy job description and performed a number of roles, and one of the most important was as the divine mother-figure to the king; she is the nurturing bovine (Wilkinson 2003: 141). Here, the king is as a child gaining nourishment from his mother’s breast. In other such depictions the king is shown standing in front of the divine bovine, whose head extends protectively over and beyond the king.

There are also those monuments where kings and queens are depicted along with their royal children. This is a common motif in the Amarna Period during the reign of Akhenaten. But a good example for our purposes here is the Small Temple of Abu Simbel, which Ramesses II commissioned for his queen Nefertari. The facade of this magnificent temple is illustrative:

Facade of the Small Temple at Abu Simbel, Dynasty 19

The colossal statues represent Ramesses II and Nefertari. They are indeed gigantic. Look to the sides of their legs and you will see small statues of their children; included here are princes Meryatum, Meryre, Rahirwenemef and Amun-her-khepeshef; and princesses Meritamun and Henuttawy. It would seem, if Ramesses II and Nefertari were actually literal giants, they were giving birth to runts. No wonder the giants died out.

I jest.

What might the archaeological record show? After so many years of people excavating the land of Egypt, where are the remains of giant humans? We are obligated to dismiss cleverly Photoshopped internet images, so what we’re left with is rather disappointing to the pro-giants crowd. No giant skeleton has ever been found. Anywhere. Historians and scientists have been studying the human remains of ancient Egyptians for many years now, and what we learn is that the ancient Egyptians were of the same physical stature and size of pretty much everyone else in the ancient Mediterranean world. Men averaged 5’3″ and women 4’10” (Nunn 1996: 20). These were not gigantic people, of course.

Some of them were pretty damn tall, however. Their height in life can be determined forensically in several different ways, but a well-preserved mummy certainly helps. Such is the case with Ramesses II, who is one of the best preserved of them all:

The mummy of Ramesses II, Dynasty 19

In life Ramesses II was probably around 5’8,” which is almost as unusual as the fact that he probably died at around 90 years of age (in a time when the average lifespan was around 35 years). Also pretty tall for his time was the boy-king, Tutankhamun:

The mummy of Tutankhamun, Dynasty 18

Tut’s is not the best-looking mummy on record, but in life this young man stood at about 5’6″, a good three inches taller than most adult men in the Bronze Age.

In my own years of research, the tallest ancient Egyptian of whom I’m aware is a man whose name no one even knows. He goes by the designation of Unknown Man E:

The mummy of Unknown Man E, New Kingdom

Unknown Man E is rather infamous for his particularly ghoulish appearance. Early historians first thought he had been violently killed or mummified alive, but there is no evidence to prove either. The prominent researcher Bob Brier has argued that this is the body of a prince of Dynasty 20 named Pentaweret, who was involved with the harem conspiracy of Ramesses III and was forced to commit suicide by ingesting poison. It is an attractive theory but not proven. Unknown Man E was not mummified but seems to have been naturally preserved inside the uninscribed coffin in which he’d been interred. Consensus is that he lived in the New Kingdom.

Unknown Man E is quite well preserved for someone who was not mummified, but that’s sometimes how it worked out when people were buried in the arid environment of the desert. Most unusual, however, is that in life this man was around 5’9″ tall.

Quite a tall man, in other words. But not a giant.

Considering this, I often think of David and Goliath. If there is any truth to this biblical tale, David was probably a man of ordinary height (around 5’3″) while Goliath could’ve been something like a towering 6’2″. Now, to the average man of the ancient Near East, that would’ve been a giant.

We can think of modern people who’ve suffered from disorders like gigantism. Such people can grow to between seven and nine feet. These are indeed giants among us. But as is well understood, gigantism is a disorder caused by the over-production of growth hormones, and folks afflicted with it suffer from all manner of complications. Human beings are not meant to grow to such heights.

The archaeological record is silent on the subject of a race of giants. Ancient man was, indeed, considerably shorter than the average modern man. Depictions of colossal figures must be understood in the context in which they were created in wall paintings and other monuments. Perhaps most important, no one should fall for cleverly devised Photoshopped images and fake newspaper articles. When we dig deeper and evaluate things from the right perspective, we find the real answers.

This brings me to my concluding point, and I had some fun with it in the fake 1936 newspaper article I concocted at the top of the page. People of the pro-giants crowd well understand, I think, how silent real-world evidence is for giants, so they frequently turn to the one desperate measure left to them: they claim the world of academia is conspiring to hide “the truth” from all of us. I wrote about this in my recent article Tactics of the Fringe. Not only is such a claim desperate, it is quite divorced from reality. Such folks would have us believe that all archaeologists and Egyptologists and historians and other specialists who’ve been at work in Egypt for the past two centuries, have worked in concert to conceal ancient giant humans from us. All this reveals is the pro-giants crowd has no real understanding of the world of academia. If they possessed an understanding, they would know such a grand and all-encompassing conspiracy could not survive a few years, much less 200 of them.

Giants are a myth.

As always, I thank you for reading my article, and I welcome comments and questions.

I thought I might switch gears and write about something a little different. For now I’ll put aside my battles against pseudo-archaeology and proffer something that might be practical to some folks—especially people with young kids.

I consider it an important duty as a museum docent to put a “human face” on Egyptian mummies. I meet and talk with a lot of people in our Egyptian galleries, from the very young to the very old, and realized a long time ago that many people really do not understand why the Egyptians mummified their dead and what mummies meant to them. Misconceptions abound. I try to clear them up. Am I always successful? Probably not, but the topic isn’t terribly difficult to grasp. I hope most people leave with a better understanding than when they arrived.

As it says in my blog’s “About Me” link, I live in Chicago and serve as a docent at the Field Museum of Natural History and the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. Both have large Egyptian exhibits but the Field in particular has a lot of mummies. More than most other museums, in fact. There are twenty human mummies in the public exhibit and twenty more in storage, deep within the mysterious and secretive bowels of the museum’s sub-basements. This does not include mummified Egyptian animals, a number of which are on display and more of which are in storage (I’m not sure of the count). Nor does it include South American mummies, mostly from ancient Peruvian cultures and numbering around fifty.

This is to say, if you function in any capacity at the Field Museum, you are always among quite a number of the ancient dead. This creeps out some people but not me. I spend a lot of time in our Egyptian galleries at the Field and have become quite fond of the mummies in there. They’re like old friends.

So, how best to understand these mummies when you visit a museum like the Field, where the anciently departed are on display? More so, for you parents out there, how do you introduce your kids to mummies in a meaningful and positive way? After all, you want them to leave the exhibit well informed and enlightened, not waking up in a pee-puddle that night and shrieking about mummies coming to get ’em. You might think I’m joking, but some adults have told me that after the first time they had visited the exhibit as little kids years back, they had nightmares for days. We chuckle over this, but the truth is, I don’t want any child to leave frightened.

I hope this article will help both kids and grown-ups to have a better understanding and appreciation of the situation.

Deal with reality

The first important thing when entering an Egyptian exhibit which contains mummies, is to deal with the exhibit realistically and with an open mind. I really do not like it when a parent is accompanying a child through the exhibit and has her hands covering the child’s eyes (this might sound odd to some of you readers, but in my years as a docent I have seen it many times). This is not productive. Nor is it helpful. Yes, it’s perfectly fine if you feel your child isn’t ready to deal with the topic of death or if you know your child is easily frightened by such things.

But if this is the case, do not visit the exhibit with the child. By ushering a kid through the hall while covering his eyes, you’re essentially telling him there’s something bad in there that they must not see. This only reinforces apprehension and anxiety. If you have an older child eager to see the exhibit and a younger child afraid of the exhibit, have one spouse accompany the older child though the exhibit while the other takes the younger child to a different exhibit in the museum.

Often you cannot know how a kid will deal with mummies. They may enter the place with little to no real experience with ancient human remains, beyond episodes of Scooby Doo, movies, and books written for young kids. Seeing the real thing for the first time can result in unpredictable encounters. I’ve met families whose kids were eager to see mummies, only to discover the mummies freak them out. Conversely, I’ve met families whose kids were very nervous about seeing mummies for the first time, only to discover that the experience greatly interests them.

If a child enters enthusiastically but quickly becomes upset and scared, quietly and gently usher him out. There’s nothing wrong with that. Mummies aren’t for everyone, but most museums will have any number of other exhibits that might be more to the kid’s liking.

A sense of humor is okay. I consider it essential to my educational kit as a docent. While it’s important to treat mummies with respect, approaching them with appropriate lightheartedness is all right. In fact, it might help a nervous child to ease up. I’ll return later to how I think mummies should be understood, but I’ve certainly used a sense of humor with adults and children alike.

Are they real?

This is probably the most common question I get in the Egyptian exhibit. I joke with people that it’s even more common than where the bathroom is, but in truth the bathroom is not even a close second. (I mention the bathroom question only as an opportunity to share what some of us ancient Egypt docents call it: the Temple of Relief.)

I get a kick out of how in awe some folks are by the fact that, yes, the mummies are real. Some people are so surprised by this fact that even after I emphasize that all of the mummies are authentic, they’ll point at different mummies and ask: “Is this one real? Is that one real, too?” Yes, they’re all real. I usually don’t mind this particular repetition because I enjoy how enthralled many people are by this fact.

Mind you, it’s usually adults who ask me this question, but naturally many kids ask it, too. Almost always I leave it to the parents to answer them, and I’ll take my cue from them. In most cases the parent will see me standing there and will ask me to answer the kids. Of course, I answer frankly with the correct answer. I don’t see any need to sugar-coat such a simple question.

In nearly all cases the parents appreciate this answer, and if anything the kids are even more enthralled by the truth, but on rare occasions I’ve met parents who don’t want their kids to hear it. Rather, they will insist to their children that the mummies are “statues.” I do not like this explanation. Not only is it dishonest but, again, it reinforces that real mummies must be frightening and should be avoided. No, they’re not statues. They were real people. I’m left thinking, If you think your kid is that afraid of the truth, why did you bring him in here? But I will not correct them. It’s not my place to do so, even if I feel compelled to do it.

I’ll accommodate visitors as much as I can. It’s part of my position, of course. I’ve met kids who are very hesitant to see mummies but are fascinated by nearly everything else in the exhibit. I remember an intelligent and articulate boy named Brandon, who was around nine years old. He was fascinated by amulets and wanted to see real examples. One of the mummies on display is a Late Period man named Harwa—the most popular mummy at the Field Museum. He’s in a standing position with a plate of glass before him, and it happens that the glass is arrayed with a display of amulets to show how they were positioned on the corpse, during the wrapping process:

Harwa, Late Period, late seventh century BCE, Dynasty 25 or early Dynasty 26, Field Museum

It also happens that Harwa’s head is unwrapped. This probably happened well over a hundred years ago, even before Harwa arrived at the Field Museum. Now, Brandon was one of those kids very nervous about mummies, but he wanted to see the amulets in front of Harwa. He bravely stepped up but shielded the area above his face with his hand. I lent a hand, too, just to make sure he couldn’t see Harwa’s mummified face. In that position, Brandon and I spent quite awhile together looking at the amulets, as he asked questions and absorbed our little teachable moment.

This worked out well for both of us. The point is, some accommodation might be necessary, and visitors of all ages tend to be very flexible. The important thing is to try to aid a nervous kid through the experience so that he walks away with a positive feeling.

There was also a father who brought his little boy into the exhibit. I do not recall the boy’s name, but he was younger than Brandon. The kid was positively beside himself with anxiety over the room full of mummies. He cried for a good ten minutes, but his dad would not relent. He wanted to guide his kid through the experience. Had it been me, I probably would’ve ushered the kid out of the exhibit to see something else, but I could see the dad’s desire to help his kid, so I assisted as best as I could. In the end we were successful and the boy’s tears dried up. He ultimately looked at many of the mummies and even asked a few questions about them, but for a while afterward I was afraid the kid would be one of those to go home and have nightmares for days to come.

Also on display is a fully unwrapped boy from the Late Period. He is absent a coffin or any other identifying artifact, so we have no way of determining what his name may have been:

Past radiographic studies of the boy’s skeletal structure have established that he may have died at around ten years of age. People are fascinated by this mummified child, but I once had a good reminder about the importance of describing mummies with respect and tact. I was talking to a little girl and her mom and pointed to the boy’s foot, which evidences a cavus deformity:

Close-up of the same mummy’s feet; note the arrow indicating the deformity of the right foot

I explained to the little girl that we do not know for certain why the boy died so young, but the deformity of his right foot indicated some kind of disease he had suffered. The girl got a very concerned look on her face, and the mom must have seen the confused look I wore because she pulled down the top of her daughter’s shirt. The little girl had a large scar from cardiac surgery, due to a congenital condition. In this case I was glad I had not used any humor in my description of the mummified boy.

Then there was a group of young kids I met next to the same mummy. Most of them were boys, and they wanted to know how we knew the mummified child was a boy (the label copy identifies him as such). Not being a parent myself, and suffering from a stubborn sort of naiveté in such situations, I explained very frankly that the boy’s private parts were preserved. As with many males in pharaonic times, this boy had been positioned with his hands over his genitalia, so the entire group of kids with whom I was speaking dropped to their knees to see for themselves.

I was amused and embarrassed at the same time.

Speaking of label copy, if you’re visiting an Egyptian exhibit and are wondering about the authenticity of a mummy, read what it has to say about that mummy. I’ve heard of artificial mummies but have never seen one, myself. However, nearly all museums will be honest about whether something they’re displaying is authentic or a replica.

But at the Field Museum they’re real. Yes, all of them.

Why did they mummify?

Now there’s a good question. It seems odd to many people that the Egyptians would go through so much work just to preserve a dead body, but then again most of the religious beliefs of ancient Egypt are nothing like those of Judaism or Christianity or Islam or any other modern religion. In fact, although traces of ancient Egyptian religion are preserved in Judeo-Christianity, the ancient religion itself is long extinct.

So it can be tricky for many people to grasp the reason the Egyptians mummified their dead. To be sure, most of the Egyptian population wasn’t mummified. Most simply couldn’t afford it. Perhaps by the later dynasties, no more than around ten percent of the population was being mummified—the wealthiest ten percent, of course. Still, over the course of the long-lasting pharaonic civilization (in excess of 3,000 years), something on the order of 70 million people were mummified. That’s a hell of a lot of mummies. Clearly those who could afford it, took it very seriously.

Put yourself in the place of an ancient Egyptian. You’ve died, and your family has brought you to the embalmer’s workshop. Your soul, or ba, has left your body and cannot rejoin it until the proper funerary rituals have been performed and your mummy is properly placed within the burial chamber of your tomb. Once all of this is accomplished, your soul is safe to return. You see this depicted on many ancient Egyptian artifacts, from coffins to papyri. A good example is from the Book of the Dead of Ani, dating to Dynasty 19:

The ba of Ani rejoining his mummy, British Museum

The ba was usually depicted as a bird with a human head and often with little human arms. Now, the Egyptians believed in several different soul components with which all people were imbued, but the ba was the freest of all these components. It could travel to the land of the dead and back, and venture out into the world to be among us.

But at desk when the sun was setting, it was in peril. Nighttime was considered mysterious and dangerous, with the absence of Re and his life-giving sun. The ba was vulnerable at this time to demons and other nasty nightly creatures, so it had to find a safe place. This safe place was the mummy. Every night it was believed that the ba would return to the mummy, there to reside until the rebirth of Re at dawn. The mummy was the safest place for the ba to go. This is why the scene of the ba fluttering above the mummy is depicted on the bellies of many coffins in later dynasties. To do so was not an act of art but one of magic. Depicting the ba as such ensured that it would, in fact, return to that mummy every night. In other cases a ceramic or wooden ba figure was placed atop the chest of the mummy, inside its coffin.

So in one sense themummy was an anchor for the ba, a safe place to return at night. But it served another purpose, too. In the Egyptian mind the afterlife was a place of paradise exactly mirroring the Egypt of the living. The land of the dead was not just a location for the dead to dwell but was physical at the same time. All the physical pleasures enjoyed in life could be enjoyed in death—eating, drinking, singing, dancing, hugging, kissing, and, yes, even sex. But to do this, a deceased person needed a physical form. The mummy enabled this. In ancient Egyptian the word for mummy was sah, which means “noble.” The mummy, in other words, was a noble, purified, eternal form (just like the everlasting mummified body of the king of the dead, the god Osiris). A physically preserved body in this plane of existence ensured that you would have a physical spirit in the afterlife.

Not so complicated, right? Nothing really like Judeo-Christianity, I agree, but to understand the beliefs and practices of an ancient civilization, it is often necessary to step outside the cultural box in which you were raised.

How did they mummify?

This is actually more complicated than it sounds. There wasn’t just one way to perform a mummification, and it took many centuries of experimentation before the Egyptians got it right. This is why most Egyptian mummies you see in museum exhibits date to later periods of pharaonic history. Most mummies from the earliest periods are poorly preserved and often in a skeletal state.

As I like to joke, the Egyptians couldn’t run out to a book store and buy Mummies for Dummies. As I said, it took a long time before the Egyptians were particularly good at mummifying bodies. The Greek writer Herodotus wrote that there were different levels of mummification according to what the family could afford, and aside from the plethora of errors he put in his The Histories (mid-5th century BCE), he seems to have gotten this right.

In essence, Egyptian mummification was a deliberate desiccation of the body. Internal organs were removed (see below) and the body was packed in a natural salt compound called natron. This process lasted anywhere from 35 to 40 days. The body was then washed and tightly bandaged in many layers of linen bandages and, in many case, full-body linen burial shrouds. Amulets might be placed on the body during the wrapping process. You’ll often hear that the wrapping process alone could take around 30 days, and in fact the Egyptians recorded a full “70 days” of mummification (40 for drying, 30 for wrapping), but this almost certainly reflected the mummification of royals and nobles. Very few people below that station would’ve undergone a month of wrapping—considerably less, in fact—but 35 to 40 days of drying seems to have been probably fairly standard in most good mummifications.

In other words, the Egyptians figured out how to turn the human body into beef jerky (another favorite joke of mine). And they got very good at it. The body was reduced to little more than skin and bones. It’s not that the Egyptians understood the bacterial processes of decay. They didn’t. But they didn’t need to. They could see how an untreated body would quickly putrefy in a desert environment. They were very familiar with the idea of salting meat to make it last—the Egyptians were domesticating cattle around 8,000 years ago, after all. Eventually they just applied the same idea to their burial practices.

What did they do with the guts…and other stuff?

Part of a high-status mummification (meaning the most expensive sort) required in most cases that several organs be removed. An embalmer sliced usually the left flank to create a wound the size of a fist, then reached in to cut out the stomach, liver, lungs, and intestines (I say usually because sometimes this wound has been found on the right side, and in other cases the organs were removed through the pelvic floor). The reason for doing this goes back to the explanation for why they mummified in the first place: the mummified body was something of a mirror image for the physical soul that would dwell forever in the land of the dead. A body needs its parts, so the stomach, liver, lungs, and intestines were often withdrawn to be dried out, as well. These were often stored in stone vessels which go by the modern term canopic jars:

Canopic jars dating to the Late Period, Field Museum

The heads on the jars represent four deities known as the Sons of Hours. The Egyptians stored the organs in such a regularized way that we can usually be fairly certain which organ went into which jar: the baboon god Hapi (from left in the above photo) held the lungs, the falcon god Qebehsenuef held the intestines, the human god Imseti held the liver, and the jackal god Duamutef held the stomach. The four jars were often stored in an elaborately decorated box known as the canopic chest.

Jars were not always used. In some cases the organs were wrapped in linen bundles fitted with plaster heads of the same gods. In the case of King Tut, his organs were stored in four beautiful gold coffinettes. And for reasons not clear, at the end of the New Kingdom (c. 1069 BCE) the jars were no longer used for storage. They continued to be made for centuries, if just to represent the four above-mentioned gods in the tomb, but following the New Kingdom the preserved organs were usually placed back inside the abdomen of the mummy or in bundles between its legs. The point was to have the organs with or near the body forever: complete in this physical world so that the physical spirit form in the afterlife would likewise be complete.

In an out-of-the-way spot in our exhibit at the Field Museum, we actually have all four organs on display. These viscera did not even usually survive till modern times, so I like that we have a full set. And I enjoy pointing them out to people. It’s funny to see their faces, adult and kid alike. They seem to be somewhat disgusted and fascinated at the same time. I always tell the kids: “Be sure to tell all your friends you saw real mummy guts!”

Mummified organs fitted with bronze Sons of Horus masks, Late Period, Field Museum

What about other body parts? The kidneys do not seem to have been of importance in pharaonic times, and were usually left in place. So was the heart, but for a different reason. The heart was the most important part of the body—physically, emotionally, and spiritually. The Egyptians more or less viewed it as the brain. People tend to chuckle when I say this, but try to think about it from the perspective of a pre-scientific society. When you’re scared or in love or are in some other way emotionally charged, your heart responds by beating faster. It makes perfect sense. The Egyptians believed the heart was the seat of emotion and intellect, and would circulate thoughts and feelings and life energy through the body. As the most important part of the body, it needed to be left in place inside the body.

Another reason for this was the hall of judgement the ba had to encounter on its journey to the afterlife, following the death of the body. The ba had to surrender its heart to the god Anubis for weighing on the scales. This is often seen in Books of the Dead:

From the Book of the Dead of Khonsurenpe, Dynasty 19 or 20, Field Museum

The heart is weighed opposite a feather, representing the concept of maat or cosmic order, balance, and justice. Only the heart of a righteous person will weigh the same as the feather. Should the heart outweigh the feather, the deceased is judged to be wicked and unworthy and his heart is promptly devoured by the monstrous creature Ammit (note this creature reclining below the scales in the above image); the soul of the deceased would be destroyed along with his heart. Naturally this never happens in the Book of the Dead. All who owned such a papyrus were judged to be righteous and worthy, of course. Ammit never gets a snack.

The point is, the heart needed to be left in place so that it would be present, in spirit form, in the hall of judgement.

The Egyptians were big on ideals. They were rather obsessed with ideals, but ideals do not always reflect reality. On occasion a mummy studied through CT-scan images reveals that no heart was left in the chest. It’s difficult to understand why this happened, but it was probably due to nothing more than sloppy work. Again, ideals do not always reflect reality.

So if the Egyptians didn’t really understand the brain, what did they do with it? I’m always a bit surprised (and pleased) by how many kids know this. The brain was usually extracted through the nose via a long rod with a hook on the end. The hook was used to break apart the brain matter, so that it flowed out the nostril in chunks. This has been confirmed in tests on human cadavers, including the famous experiment conducted by Bob Brier in the 1990s:

X-ray film of excerabration (removal of the brain), University of Maryland’s School of Medicine

I often hear people tell their kids or friends that the Egyptians sucked the brains out. No, that’s not true…thank God. And I almost always hear people say that the ruined brain matter was thrown away. In fact, I believe I’ve heard this on one or more ancient Egypt specials on the History Channel. This also is not true. While no attempt was made to preserve the brain, it wasn’t tossed out like spoiled meat. Together with all of the other waste products from mummification—this was a messy business, after all—the brain was bundled up and buried in a pit or cache nearby the tomb.

Many people, almost always kids, ask me if they took out the mummy’s eyes. No, they didn’t. Naturally the eyes just dried out in the desiccation process during mummification, so usually nothing is left of them. On occasion, however, some eye tissue does remain. In earlier times of mummification nothing special was done with the eyes or their orbits. Many of these mummies just have vacant holes where the eyes used to be. But in later periods the empty orbits were often stuffed with wads of linen or other materials, and the eyelids glued shut. In essence the mummified person looks almost like he or she is sleeping. Our Field Museum mummy Harwa is a good example of this. I introduced you to him earlier but here’s a closer shot of his profile:

Profile of the mummy Harwa

A very serene and peaceful-looking old man.

People also ask about the tongue. They didn’t usually do anything with that, either. Remember, however, that the afterlife was believed to be an eternal physical existence, so it was rather important to have a tongue so one could speak. As a backup, in case the tongue didn’t survive the mummification process or the millennia following it, they often placed an amulet in the shape of a tongue onto the tongue itself. If I might rerutn to the heart for a moment, the same concern existed for it, too. Only more so. Should the heart not survive, the soul would die. Therefore, heart amulets were commonly placed on mummies.

There’s another part of the body about which people inquire. It involves a certain part of the male anatomy. I’ve been asked this question quite a few times over the years, and it always comes from younger boys (nothing surprising there). Sometimes boys really do want to know what the embalmers did with a male mummy’s penis or scrotum. This is important business to a young boy, of course. My usual answer is, nothing. As a docent colleague of mine puts it, “Packed and ready to go.” It’s a legitimate question and it deserves a frank and honest answer. (By the way, moms are usually a little embarrassed by this question, but I find that dads often want to know the answer, too.)

But “nothing” is not a complete answer, even if I tend to leave it at that in the exhibit. On the occasional mummy, the penis is found affixed to a thigh or tied against a rod, to make it appear erect. Remember the physical nature of the afterlife—the erect penis represents male fertility and virility.

What do mummies feel like / smell like?

This is a question I’ve fielded many times. It’s almost always kids who are curious to know. Some years ago one of the museum scientists from the Anthropology Department brought out an assortment of mummified Egyptian animals that are not usually displayed. This was quite a treat and I spent awhile talking with him and examining the specimens. The animals were laid out on several tables and were accessible for close inspection by anyone passing by. While we were not allowed to touch them, of course, I was curious about what they might smell like, so I didn’t hold back. I bent down and carefully smelled most of them. There was very little odor at all, aside from a hint of mustiness from a couple of them.

I’ve never smelled a human mummy but a docent colleague with whom I work recently had the opportunity to volunteer his assistance in the CT scanning of numerous animal mummies and one human mummy. This gave him the highly enviable chance to enter Human Storage, where docents rarely are allowed to go. He reported that the entire room had a rather noticeable resinous scent. Most of the woman in attendance found it rather disconcerting but my friend thought it quite pleasant.

The resinous scent is understandable. Many mummies in ancient embalmers workshops were coated with thick layers of heated pine resin prior to wrapping, and then the wrappings themselves were often thickly coated with the same. This was especially true with mummies dating to later periods. In other cases quite a lot of incenses were used, too. Because of this mummies from later periods might not only smell resinous but sweet, too. It’s my understanding mummies from earlier periods do not have much of a scent at all, like I experienced with the animal mummies.

The same is not true if mummies are subjected to poor environmental conditions. There are stories from Victorian England of people bringing mummies home to their manors, only to have them spoil in the damp conditions of Great Britain. This is why mummies in modern museums are kept inside specially controlled display cases with the temperature and humidity carefully maintained and monitored. The same is true for the Human Storage area at the Field Museum. Mummies might look like they need moisturizer but there’s nothing a mummy hates more than dampness. If a mummy is subjected to excess humidity, there is a good chance it will quickly grow moldy, and by that point conservators might not be able to save it.

As for how they feel, I’ve never personally felt one. In most cases when scientists are working with mummies, they avoid touching them with their bare hands. Latex gloves are worn. This is because our skin contains oils and acids that can easily damage ancient human remains. More or less, however, mummies are described as feeling like very old leather. I like to describe the texture as beef jerky.

Why show mummies?

Sometimes people ask why we show mummies at all. These tend to be folks of a more sensitive nature. Some people plainly find it offensive, while in other cases it’s my understanding that people practicing certain religions or sects within religions are not allowed to view dead bodies. I can only hope that these folks don’t wander into any large Egyptian exhibit.

Some museums have actually pulled Egyptian mummies from their exhibits so as not to put dead bodies on display. This strikes me as an over-reaction and an unnecessary practice, but it’s been known to happen. Occasionally people find the display of human remains disrespectful, and while I understand their reasoning, I disagree. It’s how the human remains are displayed that’s important. It must be done not only with respect but with relevance to the culture from which the bodies came.

The Field Museum used to have a number of shrunken heads on display. This was before my time at the museum, but every now and then someone will ask me where they can find the shrunken heads. They cannot. The heads were taken off display years ago because, I’ve been told, they were not displayed in any relevant cultural context.

Our Egyptian mummies are displayed in a tactful, respectful, and culturally relevant manner. This is the case with most museums, in my opinion. Still, answering why the mummies are displayed is not always an easy or simple thing to do. If the person asking the question is dead-set on finding fault, nothing I or anyone says will be satisfactory. In most cases, however, people who ask this question just want to have a better understanding of the situation.

Mummification was an integral aspect of ancient Egyptian tradition and religion for more than 3,000 years. When one thinks of ancient Egypt, the two most common images to appear are pyramids and…mummies. The ability to view authentic mummies is an important part of the overall experience, and enables museum people such as I to provide a better and more tangible learning experience. Not to mention more memorable. Without the study of mummies we would have a poor understanding of who the Egyptians were (lifespans, diseases, diets, average height, et cetera). In other words, mummies are a powerful educational tool. Certainly the ancient people whose mummies have ended up in museum exhibits could not have fathomed such a thing happening, but their very remains have been incredibly important to us. They will become only more important as our sciences and research methods become more sophisticated.

Were they bad/good?

Many very young children have asked this question. It’s also one that’s difficult to answer because, quite frankly, we rarely have any idea what a particular ancient Egyptian man or woman was like in life. Due to movies and cartoons and other modern media many little kids have formed an opinion that mummies must be bad, so I suppose this is the origin of the question.

In nearly all cases the Egyptians strived to leave us with only good impressions of themselves. They were the ultimate spin doctors. On their own inscribed monuments many ancient Egyptians stressed how they clothed the naked and fed the hungry—this might sound very Old Testament but it was an Egyptian notion centuries before the Old Testament first existed. Orphans were protected and widows were cared for. Wives were pampered, children were doted on, and the gods were properly venerated.

No one wants to be remembered in a negative light, and the Egyptians were careful to emphasize their goodness. We certainly know about criminals and corrupt officials and heretical kings, but these were the exception.

So obviously with this sort of rigid propaganda, we can’t really know about the day-to-day, real-life personalities of most ancient Egyptians. That’s a simple fact. Still, the ancient Egyptians were human, just like us. Even a curmudgeon such as I must admit that most people are good and decent. Why would the Egyptians have been any different? There must have been a great many wonderful people in their society, as well as their share of bad apples.

At the end of the day, what I try to stress with people I meet in our exhibit, is that the mummies they’re seeing were real people. It may have been thousands of years ago, but they lived and breathed, held jobs and paid taxes, experienced triumphs and failures, knew joys and sorrows. These mummies in the display cases were moms and dads, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters. They were loved and valued family members. They lived their lives in all their fullness, and eventually died—some at old ages, some at very young ages.

Mummies are people too. We should always try to remember that. They deserve their share of respect and attention. And after all, they came from one of the greatest civilizations ever to have existed.

It’s time to put this issue to rest. This is my fourth and final installment in the hoax of the Gosford Glyphs. I suppose there’s always the chance I’ll return to the story at some future point, should more information surface that is worth comment. But for now I’d like to close our examination of the Gosford hoax with a review of modern investigations of the site and what relevant experts and witnesses have to say on the matter. Most of the material in Part 4 comes from Steve S., author of the blog All things Woy, whose investigative experience in the Gosford matter is the most throrough and rational I’ve encountered.

To begin, how far back can the Gosford glyphs really be tracked? When were they first brought to public attention? The site of the glyphs is somewhat remote, but not so much that one would expect them to have remained hidden for 4,500 years. That is, in fact, not what happened. Although it’s possible some of the glyphs may have been carved as early as the 1960s by local students, most of the carving seems to have begun in the early 1970s.

The first person to document the site was a local surveyor, now retired, named Alan Dash (Source). Dash was surveying a water easement in the early 1970s when he observed a man walking away from the Gosford site and heading toward a nearby abandoned cabin. Dash investigated the site and noticed some hieroglyphs carved along the western wall of sandstone, although at the time nothing was carved into the eastern wall.

Several months later Dash returned with a coworker to explore the site again, and noticed carvings on the eastern wall. About a year later more glyphs had been added, this time about 160 feet away from the original etchings.

The cabin to which Dash observed the man heading was frequently used by transients, and the man’s identity was never learned. The cabin was destroyed by brushfires in 1979, but this doesn’t seem to have stopped the carving activities. Early observers and photographers could chart the development of the glyphs, to a point, and the changes and additions are quite obvious. The photo below, from 1983, shows freshly cut glyphs:

Gosford Glyphs: Courtesy of All things Woy

Several of the most prominent glyphs were apparently some of the last added, and include the cartouches (see Part 3). Also among these additions was the large figure of the god Anubis. The photo below was taken in 1983:

Gosford Glyphs: Courtesy of All things Woy

Take note of the figure’s ears and compare them to the ears of the same figure in this photo from 2007:

Gosford Glyphs: Courtesy of All things Woy

The fresh quality of the cutting is painfully obvious in the first photo. When the details to the ears were added is not known, but one can see the wear to the carving in the intervening 20-plus years. This is actually significant. We are supposed to believe that these glyphs were carved in the reign of King Khufu, well over 4,000 years ago. Yet in the vicinity are authentic Aboriginal petroglyphs that are dated to about 250 years ago. These authentic petroglyphs are barely discernible today and most believe they will be entirely gone within 200 years, because of the poor quality of the sandstone. It is the same stone into which the “Egyptian hieroglyphs” were carved, but we are told by the Gosford promoters that they really do date to the third millennium BCE.

These promoters will go to great lengths to bolster their claims. Probably the staunchest supporter today is a man named Hans Dieter von Senff. I mentioned him briefly in Part 2. I am not an Australian nor have I ever been to that country, but I have a strong feeling that von Senff has taken it upon himself to pick up where Ray Johnson left off (recall that Johnson died some years ago). I’ve personally debated von Senff on the Gosford issue in an internet forum to which I belong, and while von Senff is an intelligent and articulate man, I was not left impressed.

Von Senff claims to have found a basalt chisel dating to the original carving of the glyphs (in von Senff’s position, this means 2500 BCE). He insists the chisel contains geological inclusions not native to Australia, the implication being the Egyptian sailors carried it with them from their distant desert homeland. There’s a photo of the chisel in von Senff’s paper, “Ancient Egyptians in Australia. The Kariong Glyphs, a Proto-Egyptian script deciphered” (Page 16), which can be downloaded from the internet as a PDF.

This brings up concerns of removing a possible artifact from government land—remember that Gosford is under the protection of the National Parks and Wildlife Service. While such an act is highly unethical, we needn’t worry. Not surprisingly, there isn’t much to this chisel. The closest access to Gosford is Bambara Road, and in past roadwork the Gosford City Council used countless chunks of basalt identical to von Senff’s chisel as fill. Basalt is plentiful in this area.

A bit of slight of hand, yes, but this is what hoaxers will resort to in desperation.

As I mentioned earlier, one of the Gosford promoters’ chief complaints is that no one credible has been to the site or observed the glyphs to render an expert opinion. Bear in mind that neither Ray Johnson nor Rex Gilroy, nor anyone else among the promoters, are themselves qualified in Egyptology or Egyptian hieroglyphs to render an informed opinion. But if you recall, in Part 1 I included quotes from three different Egyptologists who have seen photos of the glyphs, and all three are in agreement that the site is a hoax. What more need be asked of real experts?

Well, there is more. Numerous witnesses and experts of various fields also agree the site is a hoax. Here is a summary of some of them, together with our Egyptologists:

• 1983: David Lambert, Rock Art Conservator of the Cultural Heritage Division of the NPWS

I hate to beat a dead horse but please do remember that the above Dr. Johnson, a real Egyptologist, must not be confused with the late Australian by the same name.

Some of this is also summarized in a letter penned by Gosford Area Ranger Laurie Pasco (see here), dated May 17, 2011. The effect of this letter is that the Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service is officially on record as stating that the Gosford glyphs are a hoax.

And, finally, there is Kenneth Feder’s book Encyclopedia Of Dubious Archaeology: From Atlantis To The Walam Olum. Feder covers the Gosford site and provides a succinct and convincing conclusion that the site is a hoax. Feder himself comments that the glyphs “are a trasnparent fraud” (2010: 121).

I hope that in the four parts of this article, I have been able to demonstrate the obvious nature of the Gosford hoax. Numerous experts have evaluated the glyphs and have judged them to be fake. I should hope the average amateur historian could come to the same conclusion in a few seconds’ time. For that matter, the average layperson ought to be able to do so. The nature of the Gosford site is absurd on the face of it and stretches logic beyond its limits, but this has never thwarted its ardent supporters from insisting they’re real.

Still, I think we can all agree, no matter how ardent the supporters are, they remain wrong. No amount of zeal can change reality.

Who carved the glyphs? No one seems to know. In all likelihood more than one person is responsible. Why did the original hoaxer(s) do this? The answer to that is even more elusive. Whoever he or they are, I have a feeling he or they are having a great laugh.

This brings it to a close, then. Is there any more to be said? About Gosford, I don’t think so. Yet recently I encountered a fellow on the Net who claims to have found early Sumerian cuneiform inscriptions near Cairns. He insists he was able to translate them, yet he refuses to release his translations or drawings or photos of the inscriptions. And there’s always Rex Gilroy’s yarns about Gympie Pyramid, so all in all there’s no shortage of fringe fun to address Down Under.

But this is enough for now.

My special thanks to Steve S. of All things Woy for allowing me to use his photos and to draw on his own investigative research.

We’ve examined the backstory of the Gosford Glyphs, the main players in the story, some of the people who’ve fervently promoted the site as authentic, and have analyzed the inscription itself. Now let’s take a closer look at the hieroglyphs themselves.

I stress again that I am not an Egyptologist nor a professional historian. Nevertheless, anyone who has undergone a certain level of training in Egyptian hieroglyphs should be able, in the span of a few seconds, to determine that the Gosford Glyphs are indeed a hoax. I like to joke that it looks as though a sixth grader who likes hieroglyphs etched the Gosford Glyphs, but in point of fact the sloppy and cartoonish nature of the glyphs is not enough by itself to reveal them as a hoax. Plenty of authentic Egyptian monuments were not carved by skilled artisans simply because the people who commissioned them could not afford skilled artisans. Some authentic stelae and statuettes and the like were originally considered fake because of their poor quality, only later to be determined authentic (this was recently the case with a simple stela in the collection of the Field Museum of Natural History, in Chicago).

Rather, other aspects of the Gosford Glyphs establish beyond question that they’re fraudulent. The most important point is, all of the inscribed glyphs at the Gosford site really don’t say anything. At all. They tell no story. They are almost in total nothing more than a random scattering of Egyptian hieroglyphs. They make about as much sense as anything you or I might type by closing our eyes and pecking randomly on a keyboard. As with any written script, ancient or modern, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs required a fairly regimented system of rules following the grammar and syntax of the language.

So, one might ask, how do Australians like the late Ray Johnson and Rex Gilroy and other Gosford promoters get around this conundrum?

To be sure none of them really understand Egyptian hieroglyphs, or they would at once determine like everyone else has that the Gosford Glyphs are a hoax. Rather, they’ve come up with all sorts of creative and inventive explanations to get around the issue. Most of this stems from the original efforts of Ray Johnson to promote Gosford as real. It’s on him whom we must concentrate since so much of the silly fiction began with him.

One senses in Johnson’s enthusiastic efforts a degree of duplicity. One must wonder, how on earth did Johnson arrive at his “translation” when the glyphs at Gosford clearly don’t relate any narrative at all? It must have required a lot of work on his part to concoct the story and to build the myth from there. I have to wonder if Johnson even believed what he was preaching about Gosford, but he went to real lengths to pass off the glyphs as authentic. This includes letters fired off to people Johnson thought ought to know, such as this one from 1997 to the Gosford City Council and this one from 1994 to Dr. Dia’ Abou-Ghazi in Egypt. I wonder how Dr. Abou-Ghazi, a former director of the Cairo Museum, must feel about being dragged into this sorry tale. Johnson and the other Gosford promoters have folded her into the myth in a fashion that makes it seem as though she were in support of them, when in fact there is no evidence for this. She is merely a peripheral victim in the Gosford saga.

Johnson arrived at a creative explanation for the apparently random and scattered nature of the glyphs. He announced that they are in fact “proto-Egyptian,” of the sort used by ancient Egyptians when the writing system was brand new. Like Johnson argued in his day, those who’ve taken up the banner on his behalf insist that the style of glyphs at Gosford are so archaic that even most real Egyptologists can’t decipher them. So, one can’t help but ask, how is it that Johnson and his retinue somehow can read them so easily?

Now, for a moment of reality. The earliest-known Egyptian hieroglyphs come from a site in southern Egypt called Abydos. Specifically, they were discovered in Tomb Uj by the German Egyptologist Günter Dreyer. Tomb Uj was created in late prehistory, before the kingdom of pharaonic Egypt existed; the glyphs appear on ivory dockets and pottery fragments and date to around 3320 BCE (MacArthur 2010: 119).

Dreyer has proposed a system of translating these extremely ancient glyphs, but not all Egyptologists agree with him. While it does seem many of the glyphs are phonetic in nature, as later hieroglyphs would function, the fact is these glyphs are notoriously difficult to make sense of in some cases. I can’t say that the late Ray Johnson had Dreyer’s discovery in mind when he argued that the Gosford glyphs were “proto-Egyptian” in nature, but even if he did his argument doesn’t hold water. Here is a photo of some of the glyphs at the Gosford site:

Gosford Glyphs: Courtesy of All things Woy

For comparison, here is a sampling of some of the Tomb Uj ivory dockets with their hieroglyphs:

Hieroglyphs from Tomb Uj, Abydos

Clearly, in form and style, there is no comparison. If anything, as cartoonish as the Gosford Glyphs are, they are obviously more similar in form to hieroglyphs from most of pharaonic Egypt.

Some of the glyphs at Gosford do not even seem to be from the ancient Egyptian repertoire. One resembles a bell and another a spaceship (although alien encounters were not being implied…one hopes). Johnson got around this by stating the earliest stages of hieroglyphs numbered far more than most Egyptologists are aware of. Again, one wonders how Johnson, not an Egyptologist or historian, knew this fact when legitimate Egyptologists and historians do not. In any case Johnson argued that in the earliest stages of the script, there were more than 2,800 hieroglyphs. This would explain it, then.

Or not. Through most of pharaonic history, the repertoire of hieroglyphs exceeded 700. Some came and went, some were joined with others, and there were always a number of variants for certain glyphs. In point of fact the number of hieroglyphs was larger in the earliest periods, but reached its peak at around 1,000 in the Early Dynastic Period (Stauder 2010: 145). Some hieroglyphs were already falling by the wayside at this earliest time, and much of the full repertoire of glyphs recognizable from later periods was already in place by early in the Early Dynastic Period.

Johnson muddied the waters a bit more by explaining the glyphs might look a bit rough and contain errors because the men who cut them in the Early Bronze Age were not adept at such work. There is a hint of truth in this because not all scribes were blessed with noticeable skills, but let’s remember that this was supposed to be a royal expedition. We’ve already seen that the two principal players, princes Nefer-Djeseb and Nefer-Ti-Ru, are not attested as sons of King Khufu and are more than likely just made up, but allow me to play devil’s advocate for a moment.

These were two royal sons supposedly setting out on a dangerous and adventurous voyage. The Egyptians really did like this sort of thing, and it was the stuff of legends. Whenever a royal expedition set out, be it for trading or war, professional scribes accompanied the expedition so as to record everything. On more than a few occasions, what scribes recorded on trading or military expeditions ended up as official royal propaganda on the walls of state temples.

So Johnson’s explanation falls flat here, too. The alternative is to believe that Nefer-Djeseb and Nefer-Ti-Ru were a pair of misfits who were embarrassments to the court, so King Khufu dispatched them on a perilous journey with half-assed scribes in the hopes they would all die somewhere far away. If that’s the case, then Khufu’s plan was a grand success and the Gosford Glyphs are the real deal.

I jest. It’s hard to avoid chuckling over things like this.

About the only places where the glyphs actually do spell something are several names. We can read them on the sandstone walls of Gosford. Still, even here there are obvious errors. We can focus on one pair of names, as seen below:

"Cartouches" at Gosford

This image has been enhanced to make the pair of names stand out clearer. Immediately one notices the odd, squarish nature of the “cartouches” surrounding the names. They resemble something midway between cartouches and serekhs. The cartouche was a highly sacred symbol representing eternity—specifically the path of the sun; the name written inside a cartouche basically implied the owner of that name held dominion over everything around which the sun travels (in other words, absolutely everything). No true ancient scribe, even of minimal training, would carve cartouches like these. This would’ve been akin to an insult.

The name at left is Khufu and the name at right is our imaginary prince Nefer-Ti-Ru. The glyphs for Khufu are correct in form and orientation. However, the glyphs for Nefer-Ti-Ru are muddled and out of order, specifically the two at top. For that matter, the glyph at top-right, which is supposed to represent the “Ti” portion of the name, is not correct for that sound value. It more resembles the glyph designated S39, a shepherd’s crook (Allen 2001: 442), which carries the sound value awt (pronouncedsomething like “ah-oot”).

These are not the mistakes of a poorly trained pharaonic scribe: these are the mistakes of a modern person not acquainted with hieroglyphs.

I might be nitpicking, as I tend to do, but now let us turn our attention to the glyphs positioned above the cartouches. The two paired above Khufu’s cartouche (left) are more or less correct and can be translated as “King of Upper and Lower Egypt” or “He of the Sedge and Bee” or “King of the Dualities,” depending on your preference. However, they’re oriented backwards—they read in the opposite direction from the name. A real scribe would never have committed such an obvious and egregious error. Those above the name of Nefer-Ti-Ru (right) are also oriented backwards. They read “Son of Re” (sA-ra), a title used by kings for most of pharaonic history.

However, two things are clearly wrong about this. First, Nefer-Ti-Ru was not a king at all. It’s not just that he’s imaginary and cannot be attested in the historical record—his name should not be in a cartouche and he definitely should not carry the epithet “Son of Re.” Moreover, although widely attested in the historical record, this title did not appear for kings until the reign of Djedefre, son and successor of Khufu (Quirke 1996: 47). This is the kind of mistake made by someone not well acquainted with ancient Egypt and the development of royal titles and epithets—but not something a real scribe would ever have done.

We can toss in here an instance for the name of the other main player, Nefer-Djeseb:

Gosford Glyphs: Courtesy of All things Woy

At the top is an imaginative blending of titles which seems to read “The king, Son of Re.” I’m not aware of this in the royal titularly, but then again, as with Nefer-Ti-Ru, Nefer-Djeseb was a prince and should not be referred to as Son of Re in the first place. In any case the fact that the name appears inside a box is decidedly odd. This is not attested for personal names in pharaonic Egypt. And the glyphs certainly do not spell Nefer-Djeseb. Rather, they seem to render something like “Nefer-es-ed-eb.”

I particularly like this photograph because it’s a terrific example of random carvings made by the original hoaxer. Most of the shapes around the name-box don’t even seem to be Egyptian hieroglyphs. The hoaxer must have been running out of ideas by this point.

In our analysis of the hieroglyphs themselves we have seen that in total they do not say anything. They are a random scattering of glyphs that relate no narrative, and so how Ray Johnson arrived at his “translation” is anyone’s guess. To be sure, what Johnson concocted is complete imagination on his part. We have seen how Johnson’s arguments about “proto-Egyptian” and “unknown” glyphs do not survive scrutiny. We have seen the clumsy and amateurish errors. We have even seen how some of the glyphs are not ancient Egyptian at all.

As I said at the beginning of this installment, one can determine in the work of a few seconds that the Gosford Glyphs are a clear hoax. Those who promote the glyphs continue to build on the farce, and they do so with conviction and passion, but it doesn’t matter. They’re not taken seriously for a reason. The more they contrive, the more they fail.

I’ll share one more installment to the hoax of the Gosford Glyphs. We’ll look at what others have to say about the site and will bring this business to a close. As always, thanks for reading.

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Allen, James P. Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs. 2001.